He fired again. The cop doubled over and then fell to the pavement, his face colliding with the harsh concrete.
His shoulder was bleeding badly. He cursed the cop, and he stood over him, and his blood dripped onto the lifeless shoulders, and he held the .45 out at arm's length and squeezed the trigger again. The cop's head gave a sidewards lurch and then was still.
The man in black ran off down the street.
The cop on the sidewalk was Hank Bush.
Chapter SIXTEEN
sam grossman was a police lieutenant. He was also a lab technician. He was tall and angular, a man who'd have looked more at home on a craggy New England farm than in the sterile orderliness of the Police Laboratory which stretched almost half the length of the first floor at Headquarters.
Grossman wore glasses, and his eyes were a guileless blue behind them. There was a gentility to his manner, a quiet warmth reminiscent of a long-lost era, even though his speech bore the clipped stamp of a man who is used to dealing with cold scientific fact.
"Hank was a smart cop," he said to Carella.
Carella nodded. It was Hank who'd said that it didn't take much brain power to be a detective.
"The way I figure it," Grossman went on, "Hank thought he was a goner. The autopsy disclosed four wounds altogether, three in the chest, one at the back of the head. We can safely assume, I think, that the head shot was the last one fired, a coup de grace."
"Go ahead," Carella said.
"Figure he'd been shot two or three times already, and possibly knew he'd be a dead pigeon before this was over. Whatever the case, he knew we could use more information on the bastard doing the shooting."
"The hair, you mean?" Carella asked.
"Yes. We found clumps of hair on the sidewalk. All the hairs had living roots, so we'd have known they were pulled away by force even if we hadn't found some in the palms and fingers of Hank's hands. But he was thinking overtime. He also tore a goodly chunk of meat from the ambusher's face. That told us a few things, too."
"And what else?"
"Blood. Hank shot this guy, Steve. Well, undoubtedly you know that already."
"Yes. What does it all add up to?"
"A lot," Grossman said. He picked up a report from his desk. "This is what we know for sure, from what we were able to piece together, from what Hank gave us."
Grossman cleared his throat and began reading.
"The killer is a male, white, adult, not over say fifty years of age. He is a mechanic, possibly highly skilled and highly paid. He is dark complected, his skin is oily, he has a heavy · beard which he tries to disguise with talc. His hair is dark brown, and he is approximately six feet tall. Within the past two days, he took a haircut and a singe. He is fast, possibly indicating a man who is not overweight. Judging from the hair, he should weigh about 180. He is wounded, most likely above the waist, and not superficially."
"Break it down for me," Carella said, somewhat amazed— as he always was—by what the Lab boys could do with a rag, a bone, and a hank of hair.
"Okay," Grossman said. "Male. In this day and age, this sometimes poses a problem, especially if we've got only hair from the head. Luckily, Hank solved that one for us. The head hairs of either a male or a female will have an average diameter of less than 0.08 mm. Okay, having only a batch of head hairs to go on, we've got to resort to other measurements to determine whether or not the hair came from a male or a female. Length of the hair used to be a good gauge. If the length was more than 8 cm., we could assume the hair came from a woman. But the goddamn women nowadays are wearing their hair as short as, if not shorter than, the men. So we could have been fooled on this one, if Hank hadn't scratched this guy's face."
"What's the scratch have to do with it?"
"It gave us a skin sample, to begin with. That's how we knew the man was white, dark complected, and oily. But it also gave us a beard hair."
"How do you know it was a beard hair?"
"Simple," Grossman said. "Under the microscope, it showed up in cross-section as being triangular, with concave sides. Only beard hairs are shaped that way. The diameter, too, was greater than 0.1 mm. Simple. A beard hair. Had to be a man."
"How do you know he was a mechanic?"
"The head hairs were covered with metal dust."
"You said possibly a highly skilled and highly paid one. Why?"
"The head hairs were saturated with a hair preparation. We broke it down and checked it against our sample sheets. It's very expensive stuff. Five bucks the bottle when sold singly. Ten bucks when sold in a set with the after-shave talc. This customer was wearing both the hair gook and the talc. What mechanic can afford ten bucks for such luxuries—unless he's highly paid? If he's highly paid, chances are he's highly skilled."
"How do you know he's not over fifty?" Carella asked.
"Again, by the diameter of the hair and also the pigmentation. Here, take a look at this chart" He extended a sheet to Carella.
Age 12 days 6 months 18 months 15 years Adults
Diameter mm 0.024 0.037 0.038 0.053 0.07
"Fellow's head hair had a diameter of 0.071," Grossman said.
"That only shows he's a adult."
"Sure. But if we get a hair with a living root, and there are hardly any pigment grains in the cortex, we can be pretty sure the hair comes from an old person. This guy had plenty of pigment grains. Also, even though we rarely make any age guesses on such single evidence, an older person's hair has a tendency to become finer. This guy's hair is coarse and thick."
Carella sighed.
"Am I going too fast for you?"
"No," Carella said. "How about the singe and the haircut?"
"The singe was simple. The hairs were curled, slightly swelled, and grayish in color. Not naturally gray, you understand."
"The haircut?"
"If the guy had had a haircut just before he did the shooting, the head hairs would have shown clean-cut edges. After forty-eight hours, the cut begins to grow round. We can pretty well determine just when a guy's had his last haircut"
"You said he was six feet tall."
"Well, Ballistics helped us on that one."
"Spell it," Carella said.
"We had the blood to work with. Did I mention the guy has type O blood?"
"You guys . .." Carella started.
"Aw come on, Steve, that was simple."
"Yeah."
"Yeah," Grossman said. "Look, Steve, the blood serum of one person has the ability to agglutinate . . ." He paused. "That means clump, or bring together the red blood cells of certain other people. There are four blood groups: Group O, Group A, Group B, Group AB. Okay?"
"Okay." Carella said.
"We take the sample of blood, and we mix a little of it with samples from the four groups. Oh, hell, here's another chart for you to look at." He handed it to Carella.
1. Group O — no agglutination in either serum.
2. Group A — agglutination in serum B only.
3. Group B — agglutination in serum A only.
4. Group AB — agglutination in both serums.
"This guy's blood—and he left a nice trail of it when he was running away, in addition to several spots on the back of Hank's shirt—would not agglutinate, or clump, in any of the samples. Hence, type O. Another indication that he's white, incidentally. A and O are most common in white people. 45% of all white people are in the O group."
"How do you figure he's six feet tall. You still haven't told me."
"Well, as I said, this is where Ballistics came in. In addition to what we had, of course. The blood spots on Hank's shirt weren't of much value in determining from what height they had fallen since the cotton absorbed them when they hit. But the blood stains on the pavement told us several things."