The Kill Room

grains. A three-hundred-grain bullet is about three-quarters of an ounce. Most hunting, combat and even sniper rifles fire a bullet that’s much smaller, around 180 grains.
    She measured it with a caliber gauge, a flat metal disk with holes of various sizes punched into it. “And a rare caliber. A big one. Four twenty.”
    Rhyme frowned. “Not four sixteen?” His first thought upon seeing it in the Kill Room. The .416 was a recent innovation in rifle bullets, designed by the famous Barrett Arms. The cartridge was a variation on the .50 round used by snipers around the world. While some countries and states in the U.S. banned the .50 for civilian use, the .416 was still legal most places.
    “No, definitely bigger.” Sachs then examined the round with a microscope, low power. “And it’s a sophisticated design. It’s a hollow-point with a plastic tip—a modified spitzer.”
    Arms manufacturers began to incorporate aerodynamics into the design of their projectiles around the time, not surprisingly, that airplanes were developed. The spitzer round—from the German word for “pointed bullet”—was developed for long-distance rifle shooting. Being so streamlined, it was very accurate; the downside was that it remained intact on striking the target and caused much less damage than a blunt-tipped, hollow-point round, which would mushroom inside the flesh.
    Some bullet manufacturers came up with the idea of grafting a sharp plastic tip onto a hollow-point slug. The tip produced the streamlined quality of a spitzer round but broke away upon hitting the target, allowing the projectile to expand.
    This was the type of bullet that Barry Shales had used to kill Robert Moreno.
    Completing the streamlined design, she added, the slug was a boattail—it narrowed in the rear, just like a racing yacht, to further cut drag as it sped through the air.
    She summarized, “It’s big, heavy, accurate as hell.” Nodded at the crime scene photo of Moreno sprawled on the couch in the Kill Room, blood and tissue radiating out behind him. “And devastating.”
    She scraped the slug and analyzed some of the ejecta residue—the gas and particles that result when the powder ignites. “The best of the best,” she said. “The primers were Federal 210 match quality, the powder was Hodgdon Extreme Extruded—made to the highest tolerances. This’s your Ferrari of bullets.”
    “Who makes it?” This was the important question.
    But an Internet search returned very few hits. None of the big manufacturers like Winchester, Remington or Federal offered it and none of the retail ammo sellers stocked the bullet. Sachs, however, found some references to the mysterious round’s existence in some obscure shooting forums and learned that an arms company in New Jersey, Walker Defense Systems, might be the maker. Its website revealed that, though Walker didn’t make rifles, it manufactured a plastic-tipped spitzer .420 boattail.
    Sachs looked at Rhyme. “They only sell to the army, police… and the federal government.”
    The first goal was satisfied, the ID of the bullet. Now the team turned to finding the type of weapon that had fired it.
    “First of all,” Rhyme asked, “what kind of action was it? Bolt, semiauto, three-shot burst, full auto? Sachs, what do you think?”
    “Snipers never use full auto or bursts—too hard to compensate for repeated recoil over distance. If it was bolt-action, he wouldn’t have fired three rounds. If the first one missed, he’d’ve alerted the target, who’d go to cover. Semiauto, I’d vote.”
    Sellitto said, “Can’t be that hard to find. There’s gotta be only one or two kinds of guns in the world that’ll fire a slug like that. It’s pretty unique.”
    “ Pretty unique,” Rhyme blurted, with a frosting of sarcasm. “Just like being sort of pregnant.”
    “Linc,” Sellitto replied cheerfully, “you ever think about teaching grade school? I’m sure the kids’d love ya.”
    Sellitto was right substantively, though, Rhyme knew. The rarer the bullet, the fewer the types of guns that will fire it. This would make it easier to identify the rifle and therefore easier to trace it to Barry Shales.
    The two characteristics of a bullet that link it to the weapon that fired it are caliber, which they now knew, and rifling marks.
    All modern firearms barrels have spiral troughs cut into them to make the bullet rotate and thus move more accurately to the target. This is known as rifling