‘‘She’s just another doper cunt,’’ he said. Then: ‘‘Uh, sorry, Hester.’’
‘‘That’s fine,’’ said Hester. ‘‘She’s not my little sister.’’
‘‘Really, though,’’ he said. ‘‘She’s not stupid, but she just doesn’t want to know, so she doesn’t.’’
‘‘I can understand that,’’ I said. ‘‘Especially at this stage.’’
‘‘The scoop on the street is that it was a gang hit,’’ said Dahl. He adjusted his black Harley sweatband, which matched his black Harley tee shirt. ‘‘We’ve checked that one, haven’t we?’’ He directed that question at Nichols.
Nichols just nodded.
‘‘I mean. I don’t think there’s anybody really connected up there …’’
‘‘They’re not,’’ said the DEA rep.
‘‘It does look a lot like a hit,’’ said Hester. ‘‘An organized hit. It really does.’’ She was wearing tan slacks, a white blouse, and looked like she came from a whole different world than Dahl. Yet, five years before, she’d been in blue jeans, a cutoff denim jacket, and could have passed for his old lady. That’s what she’d worn the first time I saw her, and she could have fooled me.
‘‘That’s it,’’ said the senior DEA agent. ‘‘We can’t come up with an outfit with motive… we really can’t come up with any sort of gang that’s into it at all. Not yet. There will be once it’s harvested and bagged, but not yet. Just some high hopes, so to speak.’’
‘‘And it wasn’t that much of a patch and there’s no war on,’’ said Dahl, ‘‘but the bad guys have been wrong before. They’ve knocked off some pretty unimportant people who just happened to have given the impression they were important.’’
I nodded. I was aware of that sort of thing. ‘‘Not this Howie Phelps,’’ I said. ‘‘He couldn’t even convince himself he was important.’’ I shrugged. ‘‘Besides, if the shooters were involved with the ownership of the patch, they would have known who Howie was anyway.’’
‘‘How about this Marks?’’ asked Hester. ‘‘Boy seems to have a certain air about him.’’
‘‘Could be,’’ said Dahl. ‘‘Everybody up there thinks he’s important.’’ He thought a second. ‘‘Naw, that’s just because Marks has told ’em so. Anybody with any savvy could spot him for an idiot in a short second. Besides, he sure as hell knew Turd.’’
‘‘And his old lady,’’ said Hester dryly. ‘‘I just don’t see how anybody without savvy could put together a hit like that.’’
‘‘Yup,’’ said Nichols. ‘‘That’s the problem.’’
‘‘The real problem,’’ said Hester, ‘‘is that, as far as I can tell, there’s absolutely no reason for this to have happened at all.’’
We were quiet for a moment.
‘‘A mistake?’’ asked Dahl with a wide grin. ‘‘You can’t be telling me that it was all a well-organized mistake.’’
‘‘No,’’ said Hester. ‘‘It was no mistake. If it was a mistake, Marks wouldn’t rabbit. We just don’t know the reason, that’s all.’’
‘‘We need a motive that works,’’ I said, almost absently.
‘‘We have the motive,’’ said Nichols. ‘‘Dope is the motive, and it sure works. We just gotta get the details right.’’
I took the 13th and 14th off. It was either that or beat some kid to death with the mailbox he’d just knocked over. Saw a movie. Mowed the lawn. Got to see my wife, Sue. I remembered her from my vacation. Just being with her was a help, even though we couldn’t discuss any of the specifics of the case. She knew it was driving me nuts, because I was driving her nuts. Only I wasn’t driving her nuts directly because I was hardly around. We had a nice little reunion.
On the 15th, Hester and I met with Dr. Peters, the forensic pathologist assigned to the case. We met at his office in Cedar Rapids. He’d offered to come to the Nation County Sheriff’s Department, but I told him we could do it as easily at his place. I really didn’t want to get back into routine crap at the office, and this way I could delay it by a day. Besides, he had a really nice office, especially compared with ours.
Peters was really special. Every autopsy I’d ever been at with him in attendance, he had a story with a good point for every single organ he took out of the corpse. He’d make every effort to point out to me every single detail and explain each point. And I hung on his every word. I found we were in complete agreement about what I thought was the most vital part of the relationship between the pathologist and the cop. He narrowed the parameters for us, with anything involving the body and the cause and mechanism of death. We solved the case. He would assist in every way he could, but we had to put it together. ‘‘Quincy,’’ he’d say, ‘‘doesn’t live in Cedar Rapids.’’
Peters worked out of a single-story office-laboratory that was well furnished and well staffed. He wasn’t the only pathologist who worked out of that office, but he was by far the best. You could tell from the attitude of the nurses and secretaries, and from the occasional confirmatory questions coming from the other docs. It was amazing. He’d just think about something he wanted, and there it would be, in the hands of a staff person. From tools of the trade to coffee and rolls. And the worst part was, he didn’t demand that sort of thing. They just wanted to do it for him.
Hester and I were ushered in with just a little fanfare, which pleased us both. Peters met us at the main entrance, and we followed in his wake back to a large conference room. Coffee, rolls, napkins, sugar, tea, cream… plus two ring binders containing the autopsy records of both Howie Phelps and Bill Kellerman.
‘‘How do you want to start, Carl?’’ Dr. Peters’s way of asking where the problems were.
‘‘Well,’’ I said, fighting off the urge for a second doughnut, ‘‘we have no suspects. Period. So we gotta get to know the people who did this.’’
Peters nodded. ‘‘Let’s do that, then.’’
He opened the autopsy binder for Howie Phelps. Arthur George Phelps, according to the death certificate. ‘‘Turd’’ wasn’t mentioned. The cause of death was listed as ‘‘multiple gunshot wounds, chest, abdomen, and head,’’ with the manner of death simply given as ‘‘homicide.’’ Dr. Peters’s diagrams were there, drawn onto the standard human body outlines-anterior, posterior, left, right, top-with similar views of the skull. The entrance and exit wounds were shown by small round dots in the former, and by larger oblong shaded areas in the case of the latter. Simple, so far.
‘‘Had a little problem with the paths of the bullets,’’ said Dr. Peters. ‘‘I drew lines from the entrance to the exit wounds for each round, and they just didn’t make sense.’’ He grinned. ‘‘Until I discovered that projectile three exited above projectile two. Otherwise, there would have been more than two shooters. But there wasn’t. Three just hit the spinal column more centrally, and was deflected more to the right and up. Almost passed through the channel caused by two, and came out…’’ He looked at his notes. ‘‘… five centimeters above it.’’
‘‘Sure.’’ Hester half squinted. ‘‘Let’s see, then one shooter was above… but according to the diagram was maybe less than a foot higher?’’
‘‘Close enough,’’ said Dr. Peters. ‘‘The ground measurements place the, oh, geographical I suppose, height of the shooter about five to six inches above the target location. If the shooter was taller, a foot could be right. We only have an angle of a few degrees.’’
‘‘How much taller?’’ I asked.
‘‘Well,’’ chuckled Dr. Peters, ‘‘that’s not an easy one. There’s just such a variety of shapes involved in the human body… but unless the shooter was deformed,’’ he continued, ‘‘I’d say he was probably four inches taller than little Mr. Phelps here.’’
‘‘Ballpark taller?’’ asked Hester.
‘‘Ballpark taller,’’ said Dr. Peters. ‘‘But fairly reliable. The ground there isn’t quite level. Let’s say about fivenine or five-ten.’’ He looked at me. ‘‘And fairly strong.’’