He motioned and we traveled a few steps to the ballistics lab. Through a window at the back, I could see two guys in white hazmat suits getting ready to discharge shotguns at a car door. Goos, who’d gone to see a technician when we entered, now held an envelope out of which he spilled two objects, one an intact bullet about two inches long, the other a squashed-up fragment with a shining interior. The pretty glow, like polished jewelry, on an object that had been lethal to another human, reminded me of the odd beauty of a slide my mother’s oncologist showed me of her cancer cells.
“First thing I’d take note of,” said Goos, “is that there’s nothing about the presumed bullet wounds we were looking at in the path lab inconsistent with these projectiles. They are the remains of what is sometimes called Yugo M67 ammo, which is characteristically used in the Zastava, a full metal-jacketed, sharp-pointed round, 7.62 by 39 millimeters. This was one of Marshal Tito’s lasting contributions to humanity, creating a bullet for the Kalashnikov-style rifle that opens a bigger wound when it’s destabilized by the body.
“But here’s where our results start to go a little wobbly.” Goos went to a computer and pulled up a series of photographs of each of these pieces, magnified to about four times what the unaided eye could see. The photos showed the lands and grooves on the bullets, which were left by the raised surfaces in the gun barrel intended to impart spin. “First, they can tell from the rifling that these rounds were discharged by two different Zastavas. But it’s the intact bullet”—Goos held up the piece of lead—“that’s problematic. These boys and girls here can’t square any of the bullet wounds we saw on the remains in the path lab with a bullet of this caliber and power being left intact in a body. And it had to be in the body if we’ve recovered it from the grave. If this round struck bone, it would show some compression. And if it passed only through flesh, given where Ferko says the Chetniks were positioned, it had to have exited the bodies and thus wouldn’t be likely to be buried with the remains. Following?”
I was. But Goos and I both knew that every case had its anomalies, things that the experts found inscrutable and which were accounted for by a universal principle: Shit happened. The most famous example in the world of ballistics was the so-called ‘magic bullet’ theory of the JFK assassination, in which a single round seemed to have struck Governor Connally and then deflected to hit President Kennedy in a couple of places. I told Goos that, but he shook his head.
“There’s more, mate. Let’s go look at some fingerprints.”
Among the forensic sciences we’d been discussing, I knew prints the best. I was no expert, but I was conversant with the lingo of ridges and whorls and points of comparison. This lab was less dramatic-looking than some of the places we’d already been—just microscopes, and computers with giant monitors, hooded with black sheet metal to minimize glare. Nonetheless, Goos said, this was one of the most advanced fingerprint labs on the globe. By doing computer analysis of the hundreds of millions of digital prints that had been recorded around the world in the last twenty years, NFI had been able to attach statistical probabilities to ridge patterns, meaning they could say how often a given feature appeared in the human population, just as had long been done with DNA. Because of recent scientific disputes about whether fingerprints were actually unique to each person, the NFI technique seemed destined to become, with time, the new standard. But the old method, in which fumes of superglue were used to bring out print details, was good enough for present purposes.
“They found two good prints, one on each bullet. Troubling part is that it’s from the same digit.”
He waited for me to register the significance. Ballistics had already established that the recovered rounds had been fired by two different weapons. It seemed unlikely that the same person would have loaded both rifles. But that appeared to be the only innocent explanation.
“And here’s the print from the intact round.” After a minute of fiddling, Goos called up the image on the massive computer screen beside him. It was the standard negative image with fuming, but it was rendered in yellow against an indigo background. Goos zoomed the picture so that the place of the print on the bullet was clear. “Notice anything?”
I didn’t. It was a nice full print.
Goos used the back end of his laser pointer. “See here?”
I got it now. The print extended below the casing line. That meant the bullet had been handled after it was fired.
“Maybe kids playing around?”
“Don’t think that works, Boom. Fact is, this gravesite was tampered with. From the DNA contamination, we’re already saying somebody was handling those bones, and given the fingerprints on the bullets and the fact that the intact round doesn’t match the wounds we see in those remains, odds are that these bullets were planted—not just touched by some youngster mucking round. Somebody’s funning with us, Boom. Could be whoever done it took stuff out as well as dropped stuff in. But somebody’s been monkeying with our evidence, Boom. That’s the main point.”
This was not a welcome development.
“Were they trying to mislead us?” I asked.
“Can’t think of another reason to plant bullets, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one.”
I took all this in silently.
“Next step,” said Goos, “involves Madame Professor Tchitchikov. I’m going to send her a piece of each of the skeletons so she can match the minerals that the bones have absorbed to the soil specimens from the graves. She needs to do the chemistry before she can finish up on-site in Bosnia.”
“What about looking at the Cave?”
“She’ll do that then, too.” Goos, stoical, with his usual watery eyes, stared at me a second. “Enough strange stuff here that you might want to plan to come along.”
I groaned. I hadn’t expected to go back to Bosnia so soon, especially not to get bad news.
17.
A Meeting—April 27–May 10
So we entered another period of waiting, not only for NATO to respond to our document request, but also for Complementarity to renew our credentials with the government of BiH so we could return, along with the French geologist. While our investigation hung fire, I was asked to assume a supervisory role on two other ‘situations’ that were in the last stages of investigation, both likely to lead to charges, one in Sudan, one in Congo. With a slow schedule, I took lunch as the occasion to get to know my colleagues, including a couple of the judges who were curious about me.
At night, several times a week, I spoke to Esma, who seemed to have become submerged in New York, twice putting off her anticipated return to the Continent. Her erotic texts continued to thrill and embarrass me, arriving unpredictably, as I was at my desk comparing witness statements or in meetings with the Complementarity folks about the latest communications with Brussels. At night, before I sleep, I hear the sounds you make, the unwilling little whinny of a groan as you finally succumb to pleasure.