“No carcasses of pigs or anything else. The gelatin’s going to be bad enough in this weather.” I open a back door and tuck Lucy’s and my overnight bags on the floor because we’re running out of room.
“Who? You squeamish?” Kuster says to me.
“I don’t do tests on animals alive or dead.”
“But you’ll do them on people.”
“Deceased ones, yes. With signed consent.”
“You get signed consent from dead people?” His banter is a blend of flirting and needling that I have no patience for right now. “That sounds like quite a trick. Is that why they call you Doctor Death?”
“Whoever they is? You’ll have to ask them why they call me that.”
“You always this unfriendly?”
“Not always,” I reply.
“They’ve got this synthetic stuff that you don’t have to mix and it doesn’t stink,” Lucy comments as if Kuster was born yesterday.
“That would be too easy. He wants it to be disgusting.” Marino’s face is slick with sweat.
“We don’t have it in our budget to buy premade stuff that’s not disgusting.” Kuster’s attention is fixed on Lucy.
“I’m going inside to pay.” She trots across the ramp, her boots light on the blacktop, and somehow she manages to look cool in the sweltering heat.
“You can’t afford me,” Kuster calls after her.
“Not in the market,” she fires back at him.
“Here we go.” Marino glowers at both of them.
“How much by the pound?” Kuster yells.
“Out of season.” She pushes through the glass door leading inside the FBO.
“No kidding she’s out of season all right,” Marino says in a loaded way but Kuster isn’t listening.
The more he flirts with Lucy, the more she’ll flirt back in the way she flirts. I’d be the first to admit that he’s a compelling man, in his forties, tall and muscular like a clean-cut Ken doll in cotton twill desert-colored BDU pants and a beige T-shirt, a Smith & Wesson .40 cal in a pancake holster. I have no doubt he’s already been told he doesn’t have what it takes to wind Lucy’s clock. Marino would have repeated his favorite cliché and offered all the details. He might have gone so far as to suggest there are things going on that are suspicious, weird coincidences that are too close to home. Marino and his big mouth.
He opens the SUV’s front passenger’s door as if he and Kuster are partners and I’m a civilian ride-along. I fasten my shoulder harness. I sit quietly. I can’t get out of my mood or begin to fully understand it. I’m angry with Marino. I’m angry with everyone.
“What’s new?” Kuster props an arm on the back of the seat, turning to talk to me, his handsome face tan with a blush of a burn on his nose, his eyes grayed-out by sunglasses.
“The FBI’s been turning the Rosado estate and the sailboat inside out,” Marino answers for me.
I send Benton an email, telling him we’re safely on the ground, and at the same time a text message lands from Bryce.
My email password’s not working is yours?
Mine is fine, I reply.
Can you ask Lucy?
“Rand Bloom’s gray pickup truck was recovered from long-term parking at Logan,” Marino is saying. “And remember the white truck you told me about? The one that hit a car at the Edgewater Ferry the day before Julie Eastman was shot? You said it looked like a U-Haul bobtail?”
“You think you found it,” Kuster says rather than asks and I’m reminded again of the boxy white construction truck we saw when we were driving to Nari’s crime scene.
It also looked like a U-Haul bobtail. Marino blared his horn at it and the driver pulled over to let us pass. The killer may have been right in front of us and we had no idea. It’s just like everything else. We’re being played, made fools of, following the monster’s master plan. How amusing we must be.
“Left at a marina not far from the Rosado house in Marblehead Neck.” Marino continues passing along the latest developments, details that I feel certain won’t help us. “Plates removed, nothing inside except bleach. You could smell it a block away.”
“So the person driving it, probably the killer, ditched it. Then after he killed Rand Bloom he left in his pickup truck and skipped town,” Kuster replies as if it’s a fact.
And tailed Benton’s car, played cat and mouse with us on the highway.
“That sucks but I already knew about it,” Kuster says.
If he already knew then the FBI has contacted him, and my anger spikes. They’re asking questions, poking around, and I stare at the back of Marino’s head. What has he been saying deliberately and thoughtlessly? What CFC business has he divulged without having the common sense to anticipate the harm it might do? The FBI shunned Lucy back in the day and it would shun her now but in a far different way. It would be a different type of judgment, one that could rob her of her freedom and her life.
“A day late a dollar short, that’s the Bureau for you. Another waste of taxpayer dollars at work,” Marino says as Lucy emerges from the FBO, jogging to the SUV.
“Who’s she again?” Kuster asks me, and I don’t believe he doesn’t know and I don’t know how anyone can be playful right now. “Your daughter, your little sister? She really fly that big bird all by herself?”
Lucy slides in back with me.
“Bryce’s email,” I say to her. “A problem?”
“A security situation. I’ll explain later,” she says.
I glance at my watch. It’s quarter of five. We have at most three hours of usable daylight left.
CHAPTER 40
THE DRIVE TO THE Morris County Sheriff’s Department training center and firing range is thirty minutes in the late afternoon traffic.
I feel time. It’s tangible like a strong headwind pushing us back into a past that yawns forbidden and immutable. Lucy holds something close to her that she won’t share and I sense that eventually I will recognize whatever it is. She’s absorbed in her iPad while I stress over tests and reconstructions that I have no faith will catch a killer who has gone viral on the Internet. Since we left Boston Copperhead is trending, Lucy has informed us. I can’t abide the attention evil people get.
I don’t like the reminder that much of my energy is spent building a case instead of stopping the person responsible. It’s my job to prepare for future juries, for future attorneys, to make sure I’ve explored every molecule of an investigation and documented all of it. But that’s not enough and I’m beyond being conservative. I’m not sure I’m capable of it anymore.
Alone in my frustrated defiant thoughts I watch the scenery of handsome old homes, of horse farms behind neat fences, and meadows and parks with outcrops of purplish pudding stone. Foliage is lush and shadows dapple the roads, on West Hanover Avenue now, in and out of brightness that hurts my eyes. Lucy is busy on the Internet and I have my back to her as I stare out the window.
You’re making this too personal.
I keep telling myself that but it does no good, and for an instant I’m sentimental. Hand-painted signs advertise homegrown produce the Garden State is famous for, and I swallow hard. I feel choked up with emotions I didn’t expect. If only life were different. I’d like to pick out sweet corn, tomatoes, herbs and apples. I long to smell their freshness and feel their potential. Instead what’s around me is like a noxious fog. Deceit. Lucy has her own agenda and she and Benton have been talking.
She’s lying to me and so is he.
Kuster slows the SUV as the sprawling complex comes into sight. The brick and glass crime labs back up to the training academy, a vast tarmac surrounded by shot-up and burned-out buildings, and cars and overturned buses used for simulated scene investigation, for firefighting, K-9 and SWAT.
Beyond are miles of rolling empty grassland with berms and range towers, and momentarily we’re
bumping over a dirt road not much wider than a path, thick dust clouding up. Recent violent storms hit here first but you’d never know it. The earth has been baked bone dry by the sudden heat, still oppressive at this hour, hovering at almost ninety degrees. Tomorrow will be hotter.
We park behind one of many elevated wooden structures with corrugated green metal roofs, nothing under them but concrete pads, unpainted wooden shooting benches, sandbags, folding chairs. We get out and begin gathering our gear, and Kuster grabs a large black case, a precision guided firearm, a PGF that implements the drone technology of a tracking scope and guided trigger.
“SWAT’s latest greatest,” he continues to explain as we haul equipment through the hammering heat, setting it on the concrete pad, on the sturdy wooden benches. “I’m not saying the killer is using a PGF but he could be.”
“Where does one get them?” I ask.
“The market’s mostly wealthy big game hunters, and some law enforcement and the military but not many yet. It’s new technology. Twenty, thirty thousand dollars a pop, and you’re on a list. It’s a relatively small clientele with no good place to hide if you’re a proud owner.”
“Is anybody looking at these lists?”
“Here come the Feds. Their specialty is pencils and lists.” Marino is typically snide.
“I wanted you to see what’s possible,” Kuster says to me as he continues checking out Lucy and ignoring Marino’s bluster. “A bull’s-eye at a thousand yards is easy as pie. A novice could hit it. Even Lucy could.”
“Where’s the soft bullet trap you dreamed up?” Marino snaps open the gun case that is tagged as evidence.
“Right there.” He points.
In a weed-infested area of grass below and to the left of where we’re setting up is another concrete pad, this one with no roof. At the edge of it and pointing downrange is a section of steel pipe approximately four inches in diameter and six feet long. It’s wrapped in a thick foam material typically used for winterizing and “packed with fiberfill real tight,” Kuster describes.
“And I got some special loaded subsonic rounds for low velocity,” he adds. “Three hundred Win Mags, one-ninety grain LRX, magnum primer, ten grains of Alliant Unique powder. It’s not what was used but it will tell us something.”
“If you don’t think it’s what was used then why bother?” Lucy asks.
“For one thing nobody’s got to go downrange and try to find it. And for another the bullet remains intact, its open tip doesn’t petal and I get to see the rifling picture-perfect and how about you make yourself useful.” He’s turned up the flame on his flirting. “In the back of the SUV are a headless manikin and an ice chest. Be a good do bee and bring my friend Ichabod and the jelly head here, plus the toolbox.”
She doesn’t budge. It’s as if she didn’t hear him and that’s one of the ways she flirts back. Lucy likes him. What that might mean I don’t know, and for an instant my thoughts return to the missing ring. Janet has left Lucy before and I hope she’s not going to do it again.
“In summary”—Kuster has turned his attention to me—“we can fire test bullets with very little damage, collect them on the spot and get a clear look at the twist, the lands and grooves. All this to say that we can use photos from the ballistics labs and do a prelim comparison with the bullet fired into the trap as we stand out here sweating, and maybe spare ourselves losing hours on distant shots with a rifle we probably already know isn’t the one killing people.”
“The rifle’s bullshit.” Marino is especially full of himself and seems much too happy. “The question is where the hell did it come from?”
“Somebody bought it factory-prepped and planted it,” Lucy says. “There’s nothing customized about it. In other words over the counter.”
“You should be careful talking like you know so much,” Kuster tells her.
Inside the case tagged as evidence is the Remington .308 Marino found inside Rand Bloom’s apartment, a stainless steel barrel, a green and black spiderweb finished stock. He picks it up.
“A 5R milspec barrel with a muzzle brake,” he says, “and a real nice Leupold Mark 4 scope but there’s no fouling. I agree that the damn thing is brand-new. I don’t think it’s ever been fired.”
“Someone knew we’d figure that out in two seconds.” Lucy has wandered to the back of the SUV, reaching inside the open tailgate, pulling the manikin out.
Someone. I can’t get away from the sensation that she might have an idea who.
“It’s not our gun, I can tell you that already,” Kuster says. “The barrel’s not going to be the same but for court purposes you need more than my word for it. I’ll give you a nice chunk of copper that the jury can pass around.” His gray-tinted glasses watch Lucy lifting out the ice chest, and suddenly he lobs a pair of hearing protectors and she catches them with one hand.
She clamps them above her ears, and Kuster takes the Remington. He reaches into a foam-lined Pelican case and hands me a video camera.
“I need you to record this,” he says. “One thing I know is juries. They like pictures and they like movies. We’ll show them the lengths we’ve gone to, that we didn’t just do the DOPE in an air-conditioned lab.”
I train the camera on him and begin to record as he steps off the raised pad, down to the one at ground level. He slides open the rifle’s bolt, drops in a round, a blue polymer-tipped copper projectile seated in a shiny brass cartridge case. Pushing the bolt home with a sharp click, he lies prone on the grass, resting the butt on a rear sandbag, inserting the opening of the barrel into the end of the pipe closest to him.
“Eyes and ears!” He’s flat on his belly, the stock snuggled up against his shoulder and cheek.
A sharp crack and silence, the low velocity bullet is stopped by the tightly packed fiberfill. It doesn’t even make it six feet to the end cap.
“Hold.” He means to stop recording.
He sits up and takes off his noise-blocking earmuffs. He announces we’re going cold and raises a red flag on a pole just in case any new shooters show up. No one is to fire any weapons right now.
“Lucy?” he says. “I’ll let you and Marino set up Ichabod downrange and we’ll think big, a thousand yards to start with and we can always walk it back if we need to. But I’m thinking this sucker is popping off his prey from a distance. Get the hell on down there while we got God’s acres all to ourselves because we usually get a few knuckleheads at dusk getting ready for the next Zero Dark Thirty. Then it’s bye-bye to going downrange unless you want your head blown off.” He says to me, “You didn’t record that, right?”
JACK KUSTER UNSCREWS THE end cap from the section of pipe and begins pulling out white filler, what looks like a cloud of cotton. I watch him from a folding chair, the heat pressing down heavily as if I’m under hot water. My khaki field clothes seem glued to my skin, my sleeves rolled up and sweat trickles coolly down my arms, chest and back.
A big wad of filler and the bullet shines like a new penny, a little soot at the rear from the fast-burning powder, and Kuster says, “Well hello. Pretty much what I expected.”
I turn my attention to Marino, Lucy and the manikin, a flesh-colored plastic male torso impaled by a shiny rod that at one time was attached to a head and a stand. They grab the ice chest, the large toolbox, hearing protectors parked above their ears. They start moving downrange along the dusty dry path. The sun burns low behind power lines blackly crisscrossing the horizon, no one around, all quiet except the static of traffic we can’t see and then Kuster is standing over me with his hand outstretched.
In his palm is a large copper bullet completely intact including the blue tip as if it’s never been fired. But lands and grooves are deeply etched.
“Kind of tangles your antennas, right? Like it plays a trick on your eyes?” he says.
“Yes it does.”
He slides an iPad out of
a backpack, types for a minute and an enlarged photograph appears on the screen, the copper bullet with its four razor-sharp petals recovered under the skin of Jamal Nari’s chest. For a long beat Kuster looks at the image on the display, and he uses a 10X loop to study the bullet he recovered from the trap, picking white fibers off it. He gives the bullet to me and it feels warm and weighty.
“Not even close,” he says. “This one here that you’re holding? It’s definitely not a one-ten twist and I already know from the type of barrel, what’s known as a Rem-Tough, that it’s an eleven point two-five. The upshot, no pun intended, is the firearm we’re looking for isn’t a Remington 700 unless the barrel was swapped out with something like a Krieger. Not to mention the rounds Marino recovered from Bloom’s apartment? They’re not Barnes cases. I’ll write up my report but unless you or Marino have more questions about this particular rifle, I’m satisfied.”
I sit quietly in my folding chair, staring off at the distant figures of Lucy and Marino in the shimmering heat. I feel Kuster contemplating me like a ballistics calculation.
“Try not to show so much enthusiasm,” he says.
“I’ll try harder not to.”
“No discouragement allowed. It’s against shooting range rules.”
“What I’m trying not to feel is it wasn’t a good time to come here and do this. I’m trying not to feel it’s a waste to go through the motions of what will be needed in a trial that may never happen,” I reply without looking at him.
“We’ll get whoever it is.”
“We’re being toyed with. We’re being completely manipulated.”
“I had no idea you were such a fatalist.”
“I’ll also try to stop thinking about who else is going to die while we’re out here playing with guns.”
“I had no idea you were negative and cynical.”
“I don’t know what ideas you might have had.”
“Is it something I did?”
“Not to me.”
“We’re not playing.” He repacks the Remington in the foam cushioning of the black plastic case tagged as evidence. “But I understand your sentiments.”