“That? That’s the gun sight.”
“No, I mean what’s that on the gun sight?” Snagged on the peg was what appeared to be a shred of pink lint. But it wasn’t lint; it was human tissue. That in itself wasn’t surprising, since the blast had spattered a lot of blood and tissue. Still, something about the way it hung from the sight nagged at me; it appeared not so much spattered as torn. I took a final squint at the photo, then turned and inspected Kate’s mouth. On the inner surface of the left cheek I found it: a horizontal laceration about half an inch long, extending to the corner of the mouth. It was exactly the sort of laceration the sight might make as the gun barrel kicked. I showed the laceration to Angie, then gave Maddox a chance to look. “Anything about this strike you as odd?”
Angie bit her lip to concentrate, and her eyes darted back and forth from the photo to the corpse as she tried to work it out. I’m sure she would have, given another minute, but I couldn’t wait. “You’d think the gun sight might gouge the roof of her mouth, or knock an extra chip from one of her top teeth, or maybe gash her upper lip, right?” She nodded, frowning. “But the corner of her mouth?” I picked up the dowel and reinserted it. “That means the gun was twisted in her mouth, like so.” I rotated the dowel a quarter turn counterclockwise. “Which would have made it even harder to hold at that angle. You see what that means? It means that the gun wasn’t fired by the person lying on the sofa.”
“It means,” she said as Maddox reached for his phone, “that the gun was fired by a person standing beside the sofa.”
An hour later, Kate Nicely was sealed once more in her cheap coffin. Maddox had arranged for her to be taken, in the back of a Morningside hearse, to Dry Branch, Georgia.
Me, I would be headed for Washington, D.C., early the next morning. While Kate was headed for the GBI lab, I was bound for the Smithsonian Institution, and I was taking with me the second skull, that of the African-American boy whose left mastoid process had been shattered.
Chapter 11
The computer mouse scrolled down a list of files, and a click later, the screen filled with the life-sized likeness of a skull: the likeness of the second skull Winston Pettis’s dog had dragged home from the Florida woods. Joseph Mullins, a forensic-imaging specialist, wiggled his mouse, and the skull’s intricate image rotated on the screen as if spinning in space. I’d seen many CT scans of skulls in the past few years, but I never ceased to marvel at their detail.
I had hoped to coax another swift facial reconstruction out of Joanna Hughes before she started her maternity leave, but Joanna’s baby had other ideas: the day after she finished the androgynous face I’d taken back to Tallahassee, she’d gone into labor, and had given birth to a beautiful daughter. So instead of sending the second skull to Knoxville, I’d brought it instead to Alexandria, Virginia, home of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. My presence here at Mullins’s elbow wasn’t necessary; in fact, it was probably a time-wasting distraction for him. For me, though, it was a fascinating and eye-opening experience. I’d spent fifty thousand frequent-flier miles for my plane ticket from Tallahassee to Washington, D.C.—a foolish waste of miles, by any rational measure. But by my reckoning, time was short, the miles had been gathering dust anyhow, and the chance to watch Mullins work was well worth the hasty trip.
I’d started the morning, bright and early, by renewing my acquaintance with the TSA screeners at the Tallahassee airport. I knew to ask for the supervisor by name as soon as I approached the checkpoint, and, perhaps not surprisingly, he remembered me from my prior trip. I’d tried to get a laugh from him by asking, “Do you want to search my carrion bag?”—I all but dug my elbow into his ribs as I said “carrion”—but he obviously didn’t catch the pun.