“I just hung up on Kathy,” Jonathon said, walking across the parking lot with me. “She’s arranged a date here in town with Judge Rachael Aumand, at eight tomorrow morning.”
I turned to stare at him. “Tomorrow morning? How the hell did she pull that off?”
He smiled. “The judge said she’d come to work ninety minutes early. Kathy can be very persuasive, especially after what happened in Burlington. ’Course, I don’t think it hurt that Aumand and she went to law school together. Lucky, too, ’cause there isn’t an opening in the court docket till next month.”
“Thank God for living in a pea-sized state,” I muttered.
“There’s something else,” Jon added. “I’m guessing you asked Greg Davis to keep an eye on Norm Bouch?”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “Last night and this morning both. I didn’t want Norm busting in on me.”
“Well, he’s been trying to get hold of you-left a message with Kathy. Norm’s disappeared. He didn’t show up at the site he’s been working on, and no one’s seen him around town.”
“He must’ve heard about Lenny,” I said.
“Maybe. I hope he didn’t hear about you snatching his wife, too.”
We reached my car and I pulled open the door. “You think we should issue a BOL?”
Jonathon shook his head emphatically. A BOL involved a lot of people all of a sudden, none of whom knew the details behind the request. It also had a way of leaking outside police circles, often to the press. “It might spook him more than we want,” he said. “Push him underground. Right now, he’s probably scrambling to make sure Lenny isn’t the start of a major hemorrhage. What might be better is a selective BOL, to every unit with a specific interest in the drug business. If Norm is running around checking for damage, it’s bound to cause a ripple somewhere.”
“Time to mend fences with Steve Kiley?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.
“Say what you will about the task force,” he answered, “they have better connections than anyone I know.”
I swung in behind the steering wheel and looked up at him. “Let’s meet up at the Municipal Building. We can call him from there.”
There were two messages waiting for me at the office-one from Beverly Hillstrom, the state’s medical examiner, the other from Brian Padget. After introducing Jonathon to Sammie, and asking her to show him what she had on our two homicides, I dialed Padget’s number first. Given the time I’d spent trying to straighten him out, I wasn’t about to let him dangle longer than necessary.
“Hi, Brian. It’s Joe,” I said after he’d picked up.
“I been doing what you asked, thinking back over everything. I thought of something that’s probably pretty dumb, but I can’t get it out of my head. You know how you got me to spruce up this morning? Shave, shower, and all that? Well, I use aftershave-always have. Could that be a way to get coke into my system?”
The simplicity of the idea was startling. “Do you feel any numbness after using it?”
“No. That’s why I think it’s probably wrong. But I bleed a little when I shave-my skin’s not all that great-and it just seemed possible. It’d be like I was giving myself a dozen miniature injections, sort of. But I didn’t feel anything, and I can’t see or smell anything wrong with the stuff.”
“You wouldn’t,” I said. “It’s mostly alcohol, perfume, and coloring. It would cover anything. Stay where you are. I’m sending someone up to take the aftershave to be tested. And keep your fingers crossed. I don’t think this sounds crazy at all.”
I dialed Isador Gramm in Burlington next, the only board-certified forensic toxicologist in the state, and a man I’d consulted in the past to great advantage.
“Is it possible?” I asked him after explaining Padget’s theory.
“I’ve never heard of it, but I suppose so. You say he bleeds as a result of shaving?”
“Yes.”
There was a thoughtful pause at the other end. “I can’t see where it wouldn’t work, Joe. Alcohol would not only completely dissolve the cocaine, but it would work as a carrier taking it into the system. It would be tough for whoever spiked the aftershave to come up with just the right amount-enough to appear in the urinalysis, but not so much that your victim would notice-but that could be dumb luck. I think the coke, by the way, would have to be pure. Any cutting agent would mess things up-either make the aftershave cloudy or inhibit the effect of the cocaine.”
“I know this is a little unusual, but if I had a courier hand-deliver this bottle to you in about three hours, could you run it through your machinery and bill it to the AG’s office?”
“Moving up in the world, are we? Sure, I don’t see why not. Send it on.”
I called over to the Patrol Division and arranged for a courier. Then I dialed Beverly Hillstrom’s number.
“You do send me the most curious packages,” she told me minutes later. “Although I’ll tell you right up front that I have nothing to report on the small skeletonized remains, other than it appears to have been a male Caucasian in his mid-teens. I found absolutely nothing on what might have killed him.”
I was disappointed with that, less because it implied an investigative dead end, and more because I truly hated the idea of taking someone so young, and dumping him into the bureaucratic equivalent of a pauper’s grave.
“What about Morgan?” I asked.
“There I can be more helpful. I’ll be faxing you my full report later, but I know how you like a sneak preview. Also, I found something you might find interesting, which I’ll tell about in a moment.
“Al Gould,” she continued, “was right on the mark concerning cause of death. The first bullet caught him through the body at a sharply oblique angle, a wound which if treated within an hour or so need not have been lethal, although it did stimulate significant blood loss. The second bullet was fatal, removing the right carotid and part of the jugular and causing massive exsanguination. Both bullets passed without measurable residue or noticeable fragmentation, and both appeared to me to have been shot from far enough away not to leave any powder marks. Of course, I’ve sent the clothing and samples to the lab, but my guess-which will not appear in the report-is that your shooter was not overly skillful. I think the first shot was intended for the heart, missing it posteriorly, and the second was probably aimed at the head-the standard coup de grâce between the eyes-ending up in the throat. So unless you’re dealing with someone very clever, you can eliminate any known crack shots.
“The body otherwise,” she went on, “was unremarkable in presentation, typical of a young male in good condition. Toxicology hasn’t reported back yet-they’ll be sending you separate findings in any case-but I wouldn’t be surprised to find both alcohol and drugs present. Mr. Morgan’s inner workings showed typical signs of both, albeit not to the extent they’re often present in older and/or more self-abusive people. I would say he got around without noticeable deficit.
“Now,” she finally said, to my relief, “for the interesting anomaly I mentioned. Inside Morgan’s body, along the path of the first bullet, I found a single, tiny filament of copper wire.”
I frowned at the phone. “Could it have come from the bullet’s jacketing?”
“No. I put it under the microscope. The size and shape of it suggest it was carried there by the bullet.”
I thanked her after a few closing comments and sat back in my chair, my eyes shut. In the darkness of my memory, I flipped through a catalogue of mental snapshots, looking for the one I recalled that featured small electrical wiring.
Satisfied at last, I left my office and circled the cluster of desks in the squad room to find Sammie and Jonathon poring over her reports.
“Jon,” I asked him, “did they find any prints belonging to Norm Bouch in that Burlington apartment, or anything else that proves without doubt he was ever there?”
“Yeah, along with three dozen other people’s, plus the neighbor’s statement who said he met him once.”