After my first ten attempts, Irene reeled in the target to a mere five yards away. “Doesn’t need to be too far, don’t worry. Let’s be real, you want a gun for personal protection, you’re not gonna be shooting the guy from twenty-five yards, are you?”
The trouble may have been my utter lack of athletic ability, I don’t deny it. I had demonstrated lamentable hand-eye coordination convincingly and humiliatingly in year after year of childhood sports events. But you try shooting left-handed when you’re not. My dominant right hand dangled in its brace. At the start I had tried to wrap it around my left, for stability, but the kickback hurt too much, no matter which model gun we tried.
After half an hour, all three of us could tell it was a lost cause. I paid and tipped Irene. She handed over my Shooter Tutor as a souvenir.
In the parking lot, I crumpled it into a ball. “Well, that was embarrassing.”
“You did fine,” Tony said. “It’s my fault. I should have taken into account how hard it would be to shoot with one arm in a brace.”
“You looked ready to disown me as your sister in there.”
“Only when you were asking genuinely idiotic questions, like whether there’s a difference between a revolver and a semiautomatic.”
“Well, is there?”
“For chrissake.”
“If it makes you feel any better,” I said nastily, “you can disown me anytime you like. Since we’re not actually related.”
He spun around. His face was purple. “Don’t say that again. Ever.”
I jerked open the car door, threw myself inside, and slammed it shut. He stood frozen in the parking lot, watching me through the window the way you would watch a rabid possum.
We drove home in silence, Tony at the wheel, staring grimly out the windshield.
As we crossed the Key Bridge into Georgetown, I stretched my left hand to rest on his shoulder. He did not swat it away. That’s as close to saying sorry as Tony and I tended to get.
? ? ?
AT LUNCHTIME BEAMER Beasley telephoned. Again.
I was surprised to hear from him so soon. The formal interview had gone fine this morning. An unmarked police car had delivered me to and from the session. Both Beasley and Gerry Fleeman, the head of the Cold Case Squad, were on the video linkup asking questions; I’d thought I’d answered them satisfactorily.
But apparently, not until afterward did Beasley finish digging through the boxes. He had found evidence bullets. Several, fired from two different guns. They would have something to compare my bullet with after all.
“I thought you didn’t have sample bullets,” I said, shocked. “The one that hit Boone, I thought the killer gouged it out of the doorframe—”
“These aren’t from your crime scene. These are bullets collected as a precaution, for the purpose of comparison.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Easiest way to match a bullet isn’t against the gun that fired it. It’s against another bullet. You compare like to like. You know what rifling is? It’s the spiral grooves, on the inside of a gun barrel. Every rifle, every handgun, has rifling almost as unique as a fingerprint. Even ones made in the same batch, in the same factory. And the differences get more pronounced over time, as the gun gets cleaned and fired. So when you fire a gun, it leaves its signature on the projectile. We’re talking tiny markings. Microscopic. But a good lab tech can spot them. With homicide cases, you always fire sample shots from a weapon recovered from a crime scene.”
I was still struggling to follow this. “The point remains that you didn’t find a gun in my parents’ house. Or a bullet.”
“True. We did have suspects, though. Remember? I told you about three separate men who we brought in for questioning, for one reason or another. Two of them owned guns. Nothing illegal about that. We didn’t have cause to seize the firearms. But we did fire test bullets from them, into ballistic gelatin. Just in case. Just in case another bullet ever came along to match.”
I sucked in my breath. “You’ve been hoping all this time to get your hands on the bullet in my neck.”
“That’s an ugly way of putting it.”
“But—but why didn’t you tell me about the other bullets before?”
“I didn’t know. I’ve worked homicide on and off for forty years. We’re talking hundreds, maybe a thousand murders. Not making excuses, but that’s a lot of evidence to keep straight in your head. And like I told you, back in ’79 we were getting slammed by a new murder nearly every day here in Atlanta.” Beasley swallowed. “I was praying we’d had the sense to collect evidence bullets during your mama and daddy’s investigation, but I wasn’t sure. Couldn’t remember. Nothing in the paperwork that I had kept indicated one way or the other.”
I sighed. “I suppose it’s a miracle they weren’t thrown away. That you were able to lay hands on them after so much time.”
“If you could see what passes for a filing system down here, you’d know that that’s the truth.” He harrumphed. “Meanwhile, I gather your operation’s been bumped up to Monday.”
“Yes, and I really wish you hadn’t hassled my surgeon without checking with me first.”
“Ms. Cashion. It’s my job to collect the evidence. And to do what I can to protect you. Trust me, it’s in your interest to hurry up and get that bullet out. If I had my way, they’d be wheeling you into the OR this very minute.”
Thirty-two
* * *
Beasley’s news shook me.