Relentlessly, like a jackhammer, Waldron took him through the chain of custody. Coultas was satisfied with the way the evidence had been collected by the Salvadorans and sent to Army CID, marked with a metal scribe and put down on an evidence worksheet. Waldron left no stone unturned, right down to the head stamp at the base of each cartridge.
“Now, tell us, were these projectiles and cartridge casings all fired by the same exact weapon?”
“Yes, they were.”
“And was it this one?” Waldron held up the plastic-wrapped machine gun. Coultas leaned forward to inspect it. Theatrics.
“Yes, it was.”
“Mr. Coultas, can you tell us how you can connect a particular bullet to a particular weapon?”
Coultas settled back in his seat and pushed again with a long finger at the nosepiece of his glasses. His voice became high, nasal, and insufferably pompous. “Inside the barrel of every gun, spiral grooves are cut. This is called the ‘rifling.’ It causes the bullet to twist in a certain direction, to spin quickly and thus travel faster and with greater accuracy. Also, the spiral grooves of each type of weapon have a unique pattern. Between the grooves are raised areas called ‘lands.’ These lands and grooves make an imprint on the bullet, the gross markings that we can see under the microscope.”
He had to be a deadly instructor, Claire reflected. No wonder the FBI lab was always in trouble.
“And did the rifling system on this particular weapon match the bullets you looked at?” Waldron asked.
“Absolutely. The rifling system on this particular M-60 machine gun is what we call 4-R, a four-right system, or four lands and grooves with a right twist. Also, there’s one turn in twelve inches. Using comparison microscoping, I saw that the projectiles showed traces of this rifling. Also, I noticed that one of the lands in this barrel was narrower than the others. That was another distinguishing feature. The striations on the bullets caused by passage through a barrel were identical to the barrel of the weapon in question. That is, they all appeared to come from the same weapon.”
Farrell popped open a can of Pepsi.
“What about the cartridge casings?” Waldron asked.
“I inspected the ejected casings, looking at the primer, the firing-pin impression, the chamber markings, and, on the bottom, the breech-face impression.”
“So there’s no doubt in your mind that these bullets were fired by the machine gun you examined?”
“None whatsoever.”
“Thank you very much, Mr. Coultas. Nothing further.”
“Defense, do you have cross-examination?” Farrell asked.
“Yes, sir,” Claire said as she stood. For a few seconds she looked questioningly at the witness. Finally, she said, “Mr. Coultas, do you know if this was the gun used by Sergeant Kubik?”
“No,” he admitted.
“Oh? Why not?”
“Well, I’m really not competent to testify to that. I understand the government has already had a witness from Fort Bragg up here, describing the computer armory records and how they’re maintained. But that’s outside of my area of competence.”
“So you have no idea whose gun this was?”
“That’s right.”
“And, Mr. Coultas, you’ve already testified that you don’t know whether any of these bullets were recovered from bodies, is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“So do you know whether these bullets killed anybody?”
“No.”
“You don’t.”
“No. That’s outside my area of expertise, strictly speaking. I suppose the eyewitnesses-”
“Thank you. Now, Mr. Coultas, based on your thorough examination of the evidence, can you tell the court when these rounds were fired?”
“Actually, no.”
“You can’t? Really? You have absolutely no idea?”
“Well, the attached records-”
“I said, based on your examination of the evidence. Were they fired on the date in question, June 22, 1985?”
“I really wouldn’t know.”
“Can you tell if they were fired that week?”
“No.”
“Or that month?”
“No.”
“Or even that year?”
“No, I can’t.”
“Interesting. And, Mr. Coultas, can you tell me something? When you fire a machine gun for a long time, what happens to the barrel?”
“Well, it gets hot.”
A low chuckle from the jury box, and some titters from the spectators.
“And what do you do then? Do you keep using it?”
“Oh, no. After five hundred rounds have been fired, you change the barrel to avoid overheating. You remove it and replace it with another.”
“Even when you’re out in the field?”
“Oh, sure. The machine gun is usually issued with a spare barrel. Sometimes you might have a whole sack of barrels. They’re interchangeable. They also deteriorate. After a while, you throw them away.”
“So this particular machine gun might have been issued with two separate barrels?”
“Correct.”
“Possibly more.”
“Possibly.”
She gave Embry a sidelong glance. His eyes gleamed with, she thought, pride. “Mr. Coultas, are machine-gun barrels serialized the way guns usually are?”
“Sometimes. I’ve seen it.”
“But is this one?”
“No.”
“It’s not marked.”
“No.”
“So do you know whether this exact barrel was issued along with this exact gun?”
Coultas shook his head in bafflement as he stroked his receding chin. “I’d have no way to know that.”
“But you do know that they’re easily switched?”
“That I do know.”
“Mr. Coultas, granting for the sake of argument that this is the barrel that was used to fire the projectiles you’ve so carefully studied-isn’t it possible that someone might have switched barrels?”
“Well, I suppose so, yes.”
“You suppose so?”
“It’s possible, yes.”
“So someone might have taken this gun, with this particular serial number stamped on it, and actually put on it the barrel that was used to fire all those rounds?”
“I can’t rule it out.”
“It’s possible?”
“Theoretically, yes, it is.”
“It’s not difficult to do?”
“No, it’s not.”
“It would, in fact, be quite an easy thing to do, wouldn’t it, Mr. Coultas?”
“Yes, it would,” he said. “It would be very easy.”
“Thank you, Mr. Coultas. I have nothing further.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
The weekend, at last. Some much-needed time off. She tried to sleep late but couldn’t. She awoke before seven and realized the phone hadn’t rung in the middle of the night. Progress. Or maybe they took weekends off. She ran a very hot bath in the big old white porcelain tub in the master-suite bathroom, whose floor was tiled in tiny black-and-white octagons as in a grand hotel of old, and took a long soak. She was tempted to bring some work into the tub with her, maybe a transcript, but then forced herself not to. She needed a break. She needed to let her fevered brain rest a bit. She needed perspective on the case. So she closed her eyes and soaked away the bruises and the aches. She thought about Tom, wanted to visit him at the brig, but knew that Annie needed her even more right now.
Then she got into jeans, a sweatshirt, and sneakers, and took Annie out to breakfast in Georgetown, just the two of them. They left without notifying Devereaux, who was probably still sleeping.
“When can we go home?” Annie asked. She was making designs on her pancakes with the squeeze bottle of syrup.
“You mean Boston?”
“Yeah. I want to see my friends. I want to see Katie.”
“Soon, honey.”
“What’s ‘soon’?”
“A couple of weeks. Maybe sooner.”
“With Daddy?”
She didn’t know what to say now. No, she wanted to say. Not with Daddy. Daddy’s kangaroo court will probably find him guilty and sentence him to life in Leavenworth, where you’ll be able to visit him once in a while. It will tear your life apart. And that’s if Mommy’s able to get the sentence reduced from death. All the while, Mommy will be fighting uphill battles, writing and filing briefs like one of these half-crazed prison legal scholars, taking the case to the Army Court of Criminal Appeals, and higher and higher, all the way up to the Supreme Court. While the family’s resources dwindled away, because Harvard would have fired her, which she was sure would happen any day now. Probably at some point, once they were out of the military system, the verdict would be overturned; it surely couldn’t stand up, the government’s case was a joke. But Daddy would certainly not survive prison, because too many people wanted him dead.