The Kill Room

(even though it applies to pistols too). Gun manufacturers make these troughs—called lands (the raised part) and grooves—in various configurations, depending on the type of gun, the bullet it’s intended to shoot and its purpose. The twist, as it’s called, might spin the bullet clockwise or counter, and will spin it faster or slower depending on how many times the slug revolves in the barrel.
    A look at the slug revealed that Barry Shales’s gun spun the slug counterclockwise, once every ten inches.
    This was unusual, Rhyme knew; spirals are generally tighter, with the ratio of 1:7 or 1:8.
    “Means it’s a long barrel, right?” Rhyme asked Cooper.
    “Yep. Very long. Odd.”
    Given the rare caliber and rifling, it would normally be easy to isolate brands of semiautomatic rifles that produced characteristics like that. Ballistics databases correlate all this information and a simple computer search returns the results in seconds.
    But nothing was normal about this case.
    Sachs looked up from her computer and reported, “Not a single hit. No record of any commercial arms manufacturer making a rifle like that.”
    “Is there anything else we can tell about the gun?” Rhyme asked. “Look over the crime scene photos, Moreno’s body. See if that tells us anything.”
    The crime scene specialist shoved his glasses up high and rocked back and forth as he regarded the grim pictures. If anybody had insights it would be Mel Cooper. The detective was active in the International Association for Identification, which was nearly a hundred years old, and he had the highest levels of certification you could attain from the IAI, in all areas of specialty: Forensic Art, Footwear and Tire Track Analysis, Forensic Photography/Imaging, Tenprint Fingerprint, and Latent Print—as well as Bloodstain Pattern Analysis, a personal interest of both Cooper and Rhyme.
    He could read crime scene photos the way a doctor could an X-ray. He now said, “Ah, take a look at that, the spread.” He touched a photo, indicating the blood and bits of flesh and bone on the couch and floor behind it. “He fired from two thousand yards, right?”
    “About that,” Rhyme said.
    “Amelia, what would the typical velocity of a round that big be?”
    She shrugged. “Out of the muzzle at twenty-seven hundred feet per second, tops. Speed at impact? I’d say eighteen hundred.”
    Cooper shook his head. “That slug was traveling at over three thousand feet a second when it hit Moreno.”
    Sachs said, “Really?”
    “Positive.”
    “Fast. Real fast. Confirms the rifle had a particularly long barrel and means the shell’d be loaded with a lot of powder. Normally a slug that size would have forty or forty-two grains of propellant. For that speed, I’d guess twice as much, and that means a reinforced receiver.”
    This was the part of the rifle that held the cartridge for firing. The receiver was thicker than the barrel to withstand the initial pressure of the expanding gases, so that the gun didn’t blow up when the shooter pulled the trigger.
    “Any conclusions?”
    “Yeah,” Sachs said. “That Barry Shales, or somebody at NIOS, made the gun himself.”
    Rhyme grimaced. “So there’s no way to trace a sale of a serial-numbered rifle to NIOS or Shales. Hell.”
    His third goal, linking the bullet to Shales through his weapon, had just grown considerably more difficult.
    Sachs said, “We’re still waiting on Information Services to get back to us on the datamining. Maybe they’ll find a record of Shales buying gun parts or tools.”
    Rhyme shrugged. “Well, let’s see what else the slug tells us. Mel, friction ridge?”
    Fingerprints actually can survive a bullet’s transit through the air, through a body and sometimes even through a wall.
    Provided Barry Shales had touched the bullets with his bare fingers. Which wasn’t the case. Sachs, goggled, was blasting the slug with an alternative light source wand. “None.”
    “What about trace?”
    Cooper was going over the slug now. “Bits of glass dust from the window.” He then used tweezers to remove some minuscule bits of material. He examined the specimens closely under the microscope. “Vegetation,” Rhyme postulated, looking at the monitor.
    “Yes, that’s right,” the tech said. He ran a chemical analysis. “It’s urushiol. A skin-irritating allergen.” He looked up. “Poison ivy, sumac?”
    “Ah, the poisonwood tree. Outside the window of the Kill Room. The bullet