Flesh and Blood (39 page)

He touches the back of his neck at the base of his skull.

“And we’ll see what shape the bullets are in and if they exit the gelatin,” he says. “That’s about as much abuse as Ichabod’s going to be good for. Any other shots we do, and that includes you, we’ll simply go after steel targets, see how the PGF calculates the flight paths. Distance isn’t my big concern. I’m going to warn you right off that based on this”—he indicates the image of the bullet on the iPad—“what seems to suggest as much as a seventy-degree downward angle? We’re talking about a BC that has disturbing implications. That’s the problem we’ve got to solve.”

BC or ballistic coefficient is a mathematical measure of drag, of how well a bullet cuts through the air.

“Implications of a flight path,” he adds, “that we probably can’t simulate out here unless Lucy is in a mood to let us shoot from her helicopter. We could do that with this thing.” He pats the PGF. “We wouldn’t even need a gyrostabilizer.”

“I wish you wouldn’t suggest an idea like that,” I reply flatly.

“Why not? Someone’s going to.”

“What else has Marino said to you?” I look away from the scope, directly at him as he hunches his shoulder, wiping sweat from his neck and jaw.

“That someone might be trying to set her up. That someone might be trying to send her to prison.”

“Might be?” I’m blinded by sudden anger.

H
E LEANS AGAINST THE
edge of the bench, digging his sweaty hands into his pockets, looking down at me.

“I’m not the enemy,” Kuster says. “I’m on your side.”

“I wasn’t aware there were sides.” I push down fury I don’t want to feel.

“Let’s just put it this way. If I thought Lucy was a bad guy she wouldn’t be out here on the range with us. But it’s not what I think. It’s what the Feds think and you know what they say in my line of work. A lot of people get caught because they’re obvious and easy. It doesn’t mean they did it.”

“Your line of work?” The heat of my mood begins to simmer down from scalding to a low rolling boil.

I remember the power of my will. I focus on it. I must stay calm.

“Military. Cops. The school of hard knocks,” he says. “I know you’re married to the FBI.”

“Just to one of them.”

“And he’s not who you need to worry about I assume.”

“Has the FBI been in contact with you?” I want to hear him say it.

“Of course. You’d expect that.”

“Benton Wesley? Did you talk to my husband about my niece?”

Kuster slides his hands out of his pockets, sweat dripping off his chin, his eyes like emeralds against his shiny tan skin. “Look, there’s a lot of backstory here that you don’t necessarily know about. Marino’s from Bayonne and I grew up in Trenton. We’ve known each other for a while and have been spending a lot of time together the past six or seven months. You’re probably aware that he reconnected with his high school sweetheart, Beth Eastman. They started dating and then her daughter was shot to death as she was getting out of her car at the Edgewater Ferry. Julie was twenty-eight. She’d just gotten a promotion at Barclays and was engaged.”

“It’s terrible,” I reply. “All of these homicides are. Senseless and cold-blooded.”

“I’ve thought for a while that this killer has personal information about all of you and then things quickly began to escalate about a month ago,” Kuster continues. “Marino said we need to nip matters in the bud, build a case before someone else does. He trusted me because we’re friends and he’s known your niece since she was a kid. He knows her history and could see the writing on the wall. The problem is telling whether a former federal agent, a crack investigator like Lucy Farinelli, discovers details because she can or if it’s because she’s the one who created those details. Like dead-end tweets. Like hacking into your database. Like shooting from an elevation that might suggest a helicopter.”

“Why would she?”

“You’ve heard the story. It’s a predictable one. She’s confronted stressors in her life that have sent her over the edge. I’ve seen it before and so have you.”

“There’s no story.” Another wave of anger rolls over me. “Someone may be implicating Lucy but not enough for it to stick. None of what you’ve described stands up to scrutiny.”

“And people have been sent away for a lot less. They’ve been destroyed. We had a case last year you probably heard about. A farmer’s plowing a field and digs up skeletal remains that turned out to be those of a twenty-year-old girl who disappeared from Brooklyn in 2010. The more he tried to be helpful, to gather information and assist the Feds, the more suspicious they got. Now all he does is talk to his lawyers. He’s bankrupt. He’s a pariah. His wife’s left him. He could end up indicted for something he didn’t do all because he was trying to be a good person. See how it works?”

“I know how it works.” I realize how upset I am. I’m so incensed it’s scary.

“So let me help you catch the bad guy, but you need to sit over here in this chair.” Kuster taps the folding chair in front of the bench he leans against, where the PGF is set up but not loaded. “Easy as pie? I want you to find out for yourself.”

I stay where I am, standing behind the spotting scope on its tripod.

“Muzzle velocity, wind speed, temperature, barometric pressure and the type of bullet. And the nice thing about this baby”—he indicates the PGF—“is it does the math for you as long as you correctly enter your type of ammo and the wind, which right now is variable and minimal but on its way to stronger. Thursday morning in Cambridge around the time Jamal Nari was shot the wind was ten knots gusting at around fifteen out of the north. Now it’s flipped around which is why it’s so damn hot.”

I move the spotting scope, finding the round red metal targets attached by chains to what are called gong stands at distances ranging from one hundred yards to a mile. The last berm I can see is mirage waves in the heat and the target is nothing more than a red pinpoint. I try to settle down inside. The FBI has come close to ruining Benton more than once and now they’ll be happy to ruin Lucy. The anger is huge. It’s not going to move.

It’s my family. You don’t touch my family.

“This shooter clearly knows what he’s doing and picked ammunition accordingly.” Kuster keeps talking. “Some rounds are slippery in the wind but one-ninety LRX is hateful. It will plow on through the volatile air, through flesh, bone, whatever it hits. Massive expansion and the wound channel looks like jelly.”

“What about a subsonic load?”

“I don’t think so. That would be a bullet traveling at less than twelve hundred feet per second. But a lighter load, yes,” he says. “Add that to a big distance and the velocity drops precipitously. The bullet loses kinetic energy. If you plan it just right it stays intact and gets recovered.”

I train the scope back on Marino and Lucy as they secure the ballistic head with more tape, and I can see they’ve used a rubber mallet to drive the steel rod into the dirt, then placed large rocks around it.

“Play out what you think,” I say to Jack Kuster.

“Say one of these leaves the muzzle at 2400 feet per second instead of 2800.” He plucks a cartridge out of a box and holds it up. “In other words, a slightly lighter powder charge. Well that’s going to drop to less than 1150 feet per second at a thousand yards or an energy of less than 558 foot-pounds.”

“And depending on what it hits there could be very little expansion or collateral damage.”

“If it hits something soft like a carcass,” he agrees. “Or ballistic gelatin as opposed to a hard target like metal or in real life bone. In the round you recovered from Jamal Nari’s chest exactly how much bone did it hit?”

“It separated the vertebra and after that tunneled through soft tissue, lodging under the skin.”

“That’s part of the explanation. The other part is where the hell is the bad guy shooting from?”

“Do you know?”

“I don’t.” He pulls a small white towel out of his knapsack and hands it to me. “But what I do know is when we’re done you’re not going to think the same way.”

“And what way is that?”

“Like a scientist. Like a doctor. Like a mother or an aunt. I’m going to teach you how to think like a hunter of human beings.”

“And that feels like what in your experience?”

“It feels like nothing if they had it coming,” he says.

I watch Lucy and Marino swivel the manikin around, turning its back to us. They’re talking to each other, now walking in our direction along the narrow dirt road that’s barely wide enough for a mule utility cart. Lucy’s eyes don’t stop moving as she talks and continues her scan. I know her better than anyone. She’s worried we’re being stalked and she’s basing her worry on real information.

“You going to try this thing or what?” Kuster taps the folding chair again.

I walk over to the bench. I sit in the chair.

SWEAT STREAMS DOWN MY
face and into my eyes. I can’t get comfortable. For someone who has the strong steady hands of a surgeon, I’m shaky as I attempt to center the blue
X
in the Heads Up Display. The rifle is heavy, at least twenty pounds.

“I don’t think I’m even on the right target,” I admit.

“You’re not. The thousand-yard berm is the big one to the left.” Kuster is standing nearby, acting as my spotter, the rifle’s scope live streaming video to the iPad.

The jelly man was destroyed in two shots. Kuster nailed the area that would have been the back of the neck at the level of C2, at the base of the skull. At a thousand yards the slightly lighter load didn’t exit, there was very little damage and the bullet drop was almost 478 inches, meaning the PGF had to aim more than thirty-nine feet above the target. The heavy load round passed through the jelly head and we didn’t find the bullet. Likely it dug deep into the earth.

The intact bullet that killed Jamal Nari must have been loaded with less powder than usual. If so Lucy is right. It was deliberate. I’m not impressed that she would think of it because I’m too concerned about why she did. She’s with us and she’s not. She’s focusing keenly while her attention is all over the place, her eyes moving constantly, and I recognize the almost imperceptible turns and tilts of her head. Her peripheral vision, her hearing are on high alert. The thought moves through a dark part of my mind, a deep off-limits place. Lucy might know who
Copperhead
is. Maybe Benton has his own suspicions too and for some reason they won’t tell me.

Now we’ve switched to metal, and Kuster, Marino and Lucy are seeing exactly what I am. They let me know I’m off target by about a quarter of a mile. I look up, wiping my face and hands on the towel, then I gaze at the spread of parched grazing land, empty except for berms and their backstops, and far off, clumps of trees. I peer through the scope again. I move the barrel to the left, making very minor adjustments, finding the tiny red targets on the 750-yard berm, and then finally the pale tan berm a thousand yards away, a vague and wavy mirage. It’s as if the targets are dancing.

I push away sinister thoughts and a growing sense of hopelessness. What we can’t account for is the some seventy-degree downward flight path of the bullet that struck Nari in the back of his neck and lodged under the skin of his chest. Shadows are deepening, creeping in from all angles like nocturnal animals, the sun burning on the horizon and sinking below it in a smoldering rosy orange. I can barely see the red metal targets lined up like lollypops, and I set the white dot on the one farthest to the left and tag it. Then I change my mind.

“Windcall.” I realized we’ve been at this for more than an hour and it won’t be long before it’s too dark to see. “Maybe the wind has shifted again.”

It’s picked up and the temperature hasn’t dipped below the high eighties.

“I think you should do this,” I decide with no one in particular in mind as I reach for my bottle of water, taking a big warm swallow, no one else on the firing line except three men, military I’m sure.

They showed up about fifteen minutes ago, picking a distant steel-roofed concrete pad reserved for close range. The crisp tap-taps of their M4s are a constant bright peppering, and now and then I catch them staring at us, two men, two women with a weapon that may very well change everything we’ve ever thought about guns.

“If you don’t experience it you can’t appreciate what’s happening.” Kuster has said this repeatedly. “You can’t appreciate the reality of a weapon system like this.”

I press my cheek against the stock, squeezing the rear bag, but the rifle seems heavier the more I try. I’m fatigued and I’m struggling. The more I force things the worse they’ll get.

“If he’s using one of these, it’s not exactly doing all of the work for him,” Marino speaks up. “That’s the point.”

“A point I get all too well,” I reply.

“Five miles per hour, right to left,” Kuster says.

I press a switch, toggling in the wind speed and direction. The gyroscopes and accelerometer will compensate for barrel movement, and the computerized scope will handle distance, temperature, atmospheric pressure and elevation. I fight with the white dot again, doing a poor job of tagging the target.

“If you don’t like it clear it and take another one,” Lucy says.

Even my heartbeat bounces the white dot around, and then I get it right and press the button on the side of the trigger guard.

“Nice tag.” Kuster stares at the iPad. “Back a little out.”

I try again.

“A little more. Move forward on the bench, triangulate with your left arm and try to get comfortable, get really tucked in. Nope, clear that. Try again.”

I tag the target yet again, and I’m shaky and my vision is getting blurry. I hold the white dot on the center of the target and push the button.

“Beautiful,” Kuster says.

I line up the cross hairs. They go from blue to red as I press the trigger, but the rifle doesn’t fire. It’s calculating the conditions and any movement a target might make. Then a loud crack and a recoil kicks into my shoulder.

“Center mass about five o’clock. Good enough to get the job done.” Kuster shows me on the iPad. “Congratulations, Doc. You just killed someone at a thousand yards.”