He did not have to outline why. A substantial portion of the commissioner's departmental budget was supplied by money from federal grants, some of which trickled down to my office to subsidize the collection of data needed by various injury prevention and traffic safety agencies. The Justice Department knew how to play hardball. If antagonizing the feds did not dry up much-needed revenues, we could at least count on our lives being made miserable. The last thing the commissioner wanted was to account for every pencil and sheet of stationery purchased with grant money. I knew how it worked'. All of us would be nickel-and-dimed, papered to death.
The commissioner reached for the letter with his good arm and studied it for a moment.
He said, "Actually, the only answer may be for Mrs. Harvey to go through with her threat."
"If she gets a court order, then I will have no choice but to send her what she wants."
"I realize that. And the advantage is the FBI can't hold us accountable. The disadvantage, obviously, will be the negative publicity," he thought aloud. "Certainly, it won't shine a good light on the Department of Health and Human Services if the public knows we were forced by a judge to give Pat Harvey what she is entitled to by law. I suppose it may corroborate our friend Mr. Ring's suspicions."
The average citizen didn't even know that the Medical Examiner's Office was part of Health and Human Services. I was the one who was going to look bad. The commissioner, in good bureaucratic fashion, was setting me up to take it on the nose because he had no intention of aggravating the justice Department.
"Of course," he considered, "Pat Harvey will come across as rather heavy-handed, as using her office to throw her weight around. She may be bluffing."
"I doubt it," I said tersely.
"We'll see. " He got up from his desk and showed me to the door "I'll write Mrs. Harvey, saying you and I talked."
I'll just bet you will, I thought.
"Let me know if 1 can be of any assistance."
He smiled, avoiding my eyes.
I had just let him know I needed assistance. He might as well have had two broken arms. He wasn't going to lift a finger As soon as I got back to the office, I asked the clerks up front and Rose if a reporter from the Post had beers calling. After searching memories and digging through, old message slips, no one could come up with a Clifford J Ring. He couldn't exactly accuse me of stonewalling if, he'd never tried to reach me, I reasoned. All the same, I was perplexed.
"By the way," Rose added as I headed down the hall, "Linda's been looking for you, says she needs to see you right away."
Linda was a firearms examiner. Marino must have been by with the cartridge case, I thought. Good.
The toolmarks and firearms laboratory was on the third floor and could have passed for a used-gun shop. Revolvers, rifles, shotguns, and pistols covered virtually every inch of counter space, and evidence wrapped in brown paper was stacked chest high on the floor. I was about to decide that everyone was at lunch when I heard the muffled explosions of a gun discharging behind closed doors. Adjoining the lab was a small room used to test-fire weapons into a galvanized steel tank filled with water.
Two rounds later Linda emerged,.38 Special in one hand, spent bullets and cartridge cases in the other. She was slender and feminine, with long brown hair, good bones, and wide-spaced hazel eyes. A lab coat protected a flowing black skirt and pale yellow silk blouse with a gold circle pin at the throat. Were I sitting next to her on a plane and trying to guess 'her profession, teaching poetry or running an art gallery would have come to mind.
"Bad news, Kay," she said, setting the revolver and spent ammunition on her desk.
"I hope it doesn't pertain to the cartridge case Marino brought in," I said.
"Afraid it does. I was about to etch my initials and a lab number on it when I got a little surprise."
She moved over to the comparison microscope. "Here."
She offered me the chair. "A picture's worth a thousand words."
Seating myself, I peered into the lenses. In the field of light to my left was the stainless-steel cartridge case.
"I don't understand," I muttered, adjusting the focus. Etched inside the cartridge case's mouth were the initials "J.M."
"I thought Marino receipted this to you."
I looked up at her.
"He did. He came by about an hour ago," Linda said. "I asked him if he etched these initials, and he said he didn't. Not that I really thought he had. Marino's initials are P.M., not J.M., and he's been around long enough to know better:" Though some detectives initialed cartridge cases just as some medical examiners initialed bullets recovered from bodies, the firearms examiners discouraged the practice. Taking a stylus to metal is risky because there's always the threat one might scratch breech block, firing pin, ejector marks, or other features, such as lands and grooves, suitable for identification. Marino did know better. Like me, he always initialed the plastic bag and left the evidence inside untouched.
"Am I to believe these initials were already on this cartridge case when Marino brought it in?" I asked.
"Apparently so."
J.M. Jay Morrell, I thought, mystified. Why would a cartridge case left at the scene be marked with his initials? Linda proposed, "I'm wondering if a police officer working the scene out there had this in his pocket for some reason, and inadvertently lost it. If he had a hole in his pocket, for example?"
"I'd find that hard to believe," I said.
"Well, I've got one other theory I'll toss out. But you aren't going to like it, and I don't like it much, either. The cartridge case could have been reloaded."
"Then why would it be marked with an investigator's initials? Who on earth would reload a cartridge case marked as evidence?"
"It's happened before, Kay, and you didn't hear this from me, all right? " I just listened.
"The number of weapons and the amount of ammunition and cartridge cases collected by the police and submitted to the courts are astronomical and worth a lot of money. People get greedy, even judges. They take the stuff for themselves or sell it to gun dealers, other enthusiasts. I suppose it's remotely possible this cartridge case was collected by a police officer or submitted to the courts as evidence at some point, and ended up reloaded. It may be that whoever fired it had no idea someone's initials were etched inside it."
"We can't prove that this cartridge case belongs to the bullet I found in Deborah Harvey's lumbar spine, and won't be able to do so unless we recover the pistol," I reminded her. "We can't even say with certainty it's from a Hydra-Shok cartridge. A11 we know is it's nine-millimeter, Federal.
"True. But Federal holds the patent for Hydra-Shok ammunition, has since the late eighties. For whatever that's worth. " "Does Federal sell Hydra-Shok bullets for reloading?" I asked.
"That's the problem. No. Only the cartridges are, available on the market. But that doesn't mean someone couldn't get hold of the bullets in some other way. Steal them from the factory, have a contact who steals them from the factory. I could get them, for example, if I claimed I were working on a special project. Who knows?"
She retrieved a can of Diet Coke from her desk, adding, nothing much surprises me anymore."
"Is Marino aware of what you found?"
"I called him."
"Thank you, Linda," I said, getting up, and I was formulating my own theory, which was quite different from hers and, unfortunately, more probable. Just the thought of it made me furious. In my office I snatched up the phone and dialed Marino's pager number. He returned my call almost immediately.
"The little fuckhead," he said right off.
"Who? Linda?"
I asked, startled.
"Morrell, that's who. The lying son of a bitch. Just got off the phone with him. Said he didn't know what I was talking about until I accused him of stealing evidence for reloads - asked him if he was stealing guns and live ammo, too. Said I'd have his ass investigated by Internal Affairs. Then he started singing."