“I see. And finally, the case. Would you characterize it, please?”
“Yes, sir. Well, sir, the case indicates a handload assembled with some care and skill. Both the outside and the inside of the neck had been turned, to guarantee smooth bullet release and concentricity. The primer, a Federal Bench Rest primer, had been seated precisely in the center of the primer pocket. The flash hole had been deburred for consistent ignition and the primer pocket cleaned and reamed for perfect depth and squareness.”
“Could you mate it to the rifle?”
“Yes, sir. There are six tests and measurements that one can make to ascertain whether or not a shell was fired in the chamber of a rifle and ejected from it. These include neck diameter vis-à-vis chamber diameter, thickness, chamber imperfection pattern, rim indentations … and on and on. It passed all six.”
“So it was fired in and ejected from that rifle.”
“It would be mathematically impossible for it not to be.”
“Thank you, Mr. Jacobs. What kind of case was it?”
“Sir, it was a Federal Nickel Match .308 case. Federal doesn’t make them anymore but we found several boxes of them in Bob Lee Swagger’s shop. And we found Federal large Bench Rest Rifle Primers. We identified the powder residue in the case as IMR-4895. We found an eight-pound keg of IMR-4895 in Mr. Swagger’s shop, half gone.”
“Thank you, Mr. Jacobs.” He turned. “Your Honor, I think you can see the chain. We have motive—resentment of the president as evinced in the letter. We have opportunity, as Agent Memphis’s testimony placed Swagger in the sniper’s nest at the time of the shooting. And we have means—his rifle, custom built, painfully assembled over the years into the most efficient killing machine ever made. We have the bullet from the rifle. We have the shell ejected from the rifle. And a good man is dead. And there sits his killer.”
“We’re screwed,” said Nick to Sally.
“The prosecution rests,” said Kelso.
“Mr. Vincent.”
“Your Honor, I have no—Oh. Just out of curiosity. Mr. Jacobs, how does the rifle shoot?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“How does she shoot? If you’re examining a rifle to see if it killed a man, don’t you have to have some idea how it shoots?”
“I can assure you, sir, it has all the hallmarks of a rifle customized for maximum accuracy.”
“Yes, but how does it shoot?”
Jacobs was suddenly a bit uncomfortable.
“Your Honor,” said Kelso, “I object. This has no bearing on—”
“Mr. Kelso, you introduced the rifle to evidence, not Mr. Vincent. Objection overruled. Answer the question please, Mr. Jacobs.”
“Well, sir,” said Jacobs, “I assume it shoots very well.”
“Whoa, son,” said Sam Vincent. “You assume? Now does that mean, you haven’t fired the rifle?”
“Yes, sir. There was no cause to, given the fact that the recovered bullet was too badly damaged to read the rifling signature.”
“So you can’t say how accurate this rifle is, not ever having fired it. You can’t testify that this rifle is capable of the kind of accuracy you say it is.”
Nick held his breath, wondering if the old goat had come up with just the faintest opening.
“What’s going on?” whispered Sally.
“See,” Nick explained, “because there was no ballistic signature on the murder bullet, they couldn’t shoot it, because they didn’t want to have to say in court they failed to get a match. They just passed on the test altogether. I don’t know where this is leading.”
Jacobs held his ground.
“Sir, I’ve examined thousands of rifles in my time, and I examined that one minutely, including taking it completely apart and examining it for function and reliability, and I can say—I can guarantee you—that everything in that rifle is consistent with a weapon of extreme accuracy. There was no point in shooting the rifle, as we had no sample of its rifling to test.”
“Or maybe you did test it and it didn’t match,” said Sam Vincent.
Kelso was on his feet screaming.
“I object,” he yelled. “Counsel is impugning the integrity of the FBI’s ballistic laboratories, an institution with a worldwide reputation for integrity.”
“Or maybe the FBI tampered with the rif—” Sam started.
“That’ll be quite enough, Mr. Vincent,” said the judge. “Objection sustained. There’s no evidence to suggest tampering.”
“Sir,” said Jacobs, “may I make a statement?”
“Go ahead,” said the judge.
“Sir, I’ve been testifying in cases for over ten years and nobody has ever suggested that our lab would tamper with evidence. On my word of honor, I guarantee that that rifle is exactly, precisely the way we found it, except for disassembly and the barrel swatching process I’ve already described. It has not been altered in any way at all.”
“Seems to me he has you, Mr. Vincent,” said Judge Hughes.
“No further questions, Your Honor,” said the old man, and limped back to his chair.
“Your Honor,” said Kelso, springing up, as Jacobs left the stand. “That finishes the state’s case. I believe I’ve delivered on my promise, Your Honor. Now, the defense insisted on a preliminary, to discredit my evidence, and if you’ll allow me to point it out, he hasn’t scratched it. He hasn’t dented it. Your Honor, isn’t it time to declare this farce over and set a trial date?”
It was the contempt in his voice, as much as the triumph, that made Nick hate him.
“Mr. Vincent?”
“Your Honor.” The old man had bestirred himself. “Your Honor, I confess my best shot didn’t pay off. I’d hoped to prove that the FBI’s failure to test-fire the rifle proved the case couldn’t be made, but I just couldn’t budge that smart young feller over there.”
He had a sad moment; it was solemn in the courtroom.
Sally nudged him.
“What?”
“He’s staring at you.”
“Who?”
“Your friend.”
And so Bob was. And when their eyes met, Bob’s face suddenly lit into a big grin. Then he winked.
“What’s going on?” Sally asked.
“I think Bob the Nailer’s about to blow some smart boys to hell and gone,” Nick whispered, his breath suddenly hard to find in his chest.
“But,” said the old man, “the government has proven completely that this here rifle”—and he moved with surprising swiftness, the palsy gone from his limbs, his gut sucked in, his glasses gone—“this death rifle shot and killed Archbishop Jorge Roberto Lopez on March first of this year. That’s their whole damn case and damned if it ain’t airtight. A cat couldn’t get out of that damned bag!”
With a swift hand he picked up the rifle from the prosecutor’s table and flicked open the bolt. “Yep,” he said, booming, “Bob took a bullet, a cartridge, just like this one”—and from his pocket he pulled out a gleaming brass cartridge—“just like this Winchester Ranger 168-grain .308 hollowpoint—”
It suddenly occurred to the judge that the cartridge was live.
“Mr. Vincent, that bullet is not to be inserted in—” But Sam slapped the cartridge into the chamber and drove the bolt home. The sudden overwhelming power of the loaded rifle, that utterly transforming alchemy by which a mute piece of equipment, after insertion of the little missile of brass and powder and lead, becomes an almost living presence, filled the courtroom.
Kelso didn’t even bother to object. Two bailiffs quietly put their hands on their revolvers.
“Mr. Vincent,” said the judge, “you now have a loaded weapon in your hand. I formally order you to unload it quickly, and no nonsense about it, or, sir, I will find you in contempt and lock you up for the rest of your life. Bailiff, if Mr. Vincent doesn’t comply—”
“Your Honor, Your Honor,” said Old Sam. “I have no intention of firing this here murder gun that the FBI and the prosecution have pr
oven Bob Lee Swagger killed the Archbishop Robert Lopez with, no sir.”
He held the rifle aloft, its muzzle skyward.
“No, sir,” he said, “no, sir, I have no intention of firing it.” Then he smiled. “On the other hand,” he said, “I didn’t say nothing about pulling the trigger.”
He pulled the trigger.
In years that followed, Nick would recollect that the loudest shot in the long and violent story of Bob Lee Swagger was also the quietest. But at the time, he had no way of knowing that. Like everybody else in the room, he watched the old man’s finger constrict on the trigger and, anticipating the hugeness of the explosion caused by the crazy old man in the constricted space, he felt his face crack into a flinch.
Click, went the rifle, no louder than a pencil dropping on the floor.
Silence. Then chaos.
“Order, order,” shouted the judge.
“Your Honor,” shouted Kelso, “I object, I don’t know what the point of inserting a dummy cartridge into—” And then he shut up himself, and shot a look at Howard.
“Your Honor,” said Sam, “it wasn’t no dummy. I could point out the dummies in here, but this cartridge isn’t one of them. You could feed a thousand, a million live cartridges through this rifle. Because it does everything the FBI says it does, except one. It don’t shoot.”
Quickly, he ejected the cartridge to the floor, then pushed the bolt-retaining lever in front of the trigger and released the bolt. He set the rifle down on the prosecution table, and held the bolt up. Then he pressed the bolt against the tabletop to release the spring mechanism and in five expert seconds broke the bolt down to its components, one of which he held aloft.
“The firing pin, Your Honor,” he said. “As the young man pointed out, it’s a titanium firing pin, for faster lock time. What he didn’t point out, because he didn’t notice, was that it ain’t four point five-six-five inches long, as the Remington specs call for. No, sir, it’s four point four-six-five inches long. Ain’t no way it’s long enough to reach the primer. Now if you looked real careful, you’d see that a man who knew all about rifles took this little sucker and cut it in two with a file. Then he removed just one tenth of an inch of metal from the pin shaft. Then he welded it together again, and you’d have to measure it with a set of Jap calipers to tell the difference, but the one thing sure as death is that it ain’t long enough to reach the primer. Just by a hair, but close don’t count. It don’t shoot. It don’t go bang. Now why would he do that? If Bob Lee Swagger were a sly man, you might say that at some time in his past when he was shooting for some people, he noticed that somebody had removed one of the spent casings on his handloads and replaced it with another. It bothered him. A small thing, ten cents’ worth of brass, that’s all. But it bothered him. And so later he took out the firing pin and he performed that surgery and then he put it back, because he suspected something strange was going on in his life. And maybe all these months he’s known he had absolute physical proof that he could not have shot the archbishop and the FBI and the government didn’t know diddly. And maybe he used that time to find out who those men are, and what dark deeds they’d done in the past. Your Honor, you may have noticed that on the first day of deer season last month in Arkansas, there was an astonishing number of accidents. Three men killed on one day? Amazing, what with hunting accidents way down these days on account of blaze orange. But you know, Your Honor, sometimes justice happens in strange ways that men and courts can’t quite understand.
“And so who fired the shot that killed Archbishop Jorge Roberto Lopez? You’ll have to ask Bob Lee Swagger. Maybe he’ll tell you. He won’t tell me. But we do know this. Someone else fired that bullet from another rifle. ’Cause this one don’t work. That’s what the irrefutable evidence says. So, Your Honor, I ask you. Is there a case here? Or are we trying the wrong case?”
The judge asked the two attorneys to stand.
He looked at them both squarely.
“Mr. Kelso,” he finally said, “what are you doing here? You have a murder to solve and you’re nowhere near solving it. You haven’t even started. Bailiff, please release Mr. Swagger. He is free to live his own life now. I’m dismissing all charges. And I think that should do it. I think we can all go home now.”
The reporters exploded out of the courtroom to file the day’s astonishing events. In this ruckus, almost unnoticed, Bob stood, smiled easily, shook Sam Vincent’s hand, then came over to Nick, his bonds at last off.
“You did good, Nick. You can spot for me any day.”
“You did good yourself, old man.”
“Aren’t we a damn team, though? You sure you weren’t a Marine?”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Well, you take care now. It was fun.”
“It was.”
Bob Lee walked away, and within seconds, somehow, was gone. It was the sniper’s gift. To disappear, leaving no trace, gone suddenly and totally.
Nick turned to Sally, but instead found himself looking upon the ruined face of Howard D. Utey.
“Howard, you weren’t even close. You didn’t even muss his hair. He just blew you away.” Over Howard’s shoulder, he could see the old man Meachum standing in the shadows, watching. Nick almost called out to him, but Meachum stepped back and he too vanished.
Then he turned to Sally.
“You want to get out of here?”
“Boy, do I.”
“Where to?”
“Oh, I think we could figure something out.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The scandal was a flame. It burned hot and bright and it devoured those who attempted to control it. Howard was unceremoniously retired by a humiliated Federal Bureau of Investigation before the week was over, as were the other three members of the Lancer Committee; the U.S. Attorney’s Office reassigned young Philip Kelso to a far western state, but he refused the assignment, resigned, and went into private practice. The real shocker, however, was Hugh Meachum, dead on the third day after the hearing by coronary aneurysm. His heart simply exploded, as if hit by a bullet.
When he heard, Nick thought: He got them all. Every last one of them.
He was spending a long, glorious week just being with Sally, in her apartment mostly, but with a few other stops, when at last a phone call tracked him down. It was Hap Fencl.
“Quite a mess here, bub.”
“Yeah, well,” said Nick.
“Know where I might find a good, slightly used special agent? We got some snappy cases going down, need a guy with expericncc.”
“Wasn’t I fired?”
“Oh, Nick, gee, some guy may have had an idea like that, but he’s long gone, and I don’t think you could find anybody in the personnel office who knows where the paperwork went. Nick, seriously. This is where you belong. You were right. Howard was a mistake. They come along, sometimes. But they destroy themselves. It’s a good outfit. Guys like you make it good.”
“Oh, hell.”
“Come on, Nick. Nothing special, just street work, New Orleans, the same salary, back pay. Some guys in Washington want to talk to you about this RamDyne thing, so you may as well get paid for it.”
Nick breathed heavily. He just wanted to be an FBI agent, that was all he’d ever wanted.
“Okay,” he finally said, “see you tomorrow.”
“And Nick. Marry that damned girl, will you?”
“Well, dammit,” he said, “I did. Yesterday.”
“Congrats. See you, partner.”
So Nick went back on duty, and spent his honeymoon in Washington, two weeks of telling his RamDyne story over and over again, as a crack team of hotshots tried to track down the elusive truth. That unit is due to release its report. It will happen any day now, you may be sure of it.
It would have helped matters immensely, of course, if they’d ever found Dr. David Dobbler. But they never did; he was either dead in the fastness of the Ouachitas, or perhaps living by his wits under a new name in some Southern California
resort town. Nick always favored the latter explanation.
Of RamDyne, no trace remained. Its staff dispersed, its seedy headquarters languished and is now the location of a small software concern; those who spoke to the FBI were lower-level people, who knew nothing. Colonel Raymond Shreck’s body went unclaimed; it was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, not far from John F. Kennedy’s, because after all, the colonel had won the Silver Star and the DSC in Korea and another Silver and three Bronze Stars in Vietnam. John D. “Jack” Payne was buried in the United States Army cemetery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He, too, had been a hero.
And James Thomas Albright, or Lon Scott, his secrets lost forever, went into a mausoleum outside Danville, where his remains joined those of his father and his mother, which he had had disinterred and brought down from Vermont. He willed his collection of benchrest rifles and shooting memorabilia to the National Rifle Association, and the Tenth Black King now resides in its National Firearms Museum in Washington, D.C., testament to a time when skill with a rifle was the most gentlemanly of all pursuits and men like Art Scott represented their country proudly with Winchester’s best in their hands. The Association had little use for the other effects, including a curious collection of fired 162-grain .264 caliber bullets from some bizarre project or other in the early sixties, found in his safe deposit box. His corporate portfolio, amounting to over seven million dollars, went to the National Association of Quadriplegics.
Bob Lee Swagger was another instant MIA. When all state charges were dropped as a consequence of the collapse of the federal case, he vanished from public sight almost immediately with the woman Julie Fenn. But he paid his debts, in the currency of his choice.
An ex-big game hunter in Oklahoma was astounded to discover a package delivered to his doorstep. Opening it, the old man cackled with glee.
It was a pre-’64 Model 70 in .270 Winchester.
No note accompanied the weapon, only a tag.