He reached across and pointed at the hole right beside the lower right staple that secured the target. “I made one.” He took his ballpoint pen out of his shirt pocket. “And this is what’s interesting.” He lightly circled the irregular hole.
“It’s keyholing,” I said. “At what, only fifty feet?”
“Yes, sir.”
I turned away and walked out to the target stand. The hole through the forehead was true, but the other two were skewed, indicating that the bullet had wandered and slapped through the paper obliquely, damn near sideways…reminiscent of how the single slug had smacked Larry Zipoli just above the eyebrow.
“That’s half of it, sir,” Torrez prompted as he saw me settle into a quiet moment of reflection. He pointed at a cardboard box. “I ran both guns through my chronograph.” I knew that the little gadgets used two sensors triggered by the shadow of the bullet as it sped by. Simple stuff for the electronic chips inside the machine to compute velocity in feet per second.
The deputy pulled a small notebook out of his pocket. “The.30–30 cartridges, fired from a standard.30–30 Winchester,” and he jerked his chin toward the second rifle case, “worked out to an average velocity of 2270 feet per second. That’s an average. They were pretty darn consistent.”
“And so?” I relaxed back against the narrow shelf of the bumper.
“When I fired the.30 caliber ammo in the.32…” He held out the notebook. “Take a look at these.” The velocity of each of five rounds was recorded in Torrez’s block printing. The shots ranged wildly, the slowest at 1712 feet per second, the fastest hitting 1925.
“So,” I said, “not only is the damn thing grossly inaccurate, not only does it throw bullets sideways, but it’s also slowed way down. Not fast enough to pass through both the windshield and Larry Zipoli’s skull. What did you get for penetration in that block of firewood? About five inches?”
“Give or take.”
I let all that digest for a moment. I had to admit that the little butterflies of excitement were starting to flutter in my gut.
“That could be how it happened, sir.”
“Yes, it could. You have the right ballistics to match the penetration, you’ve got the yaw of a sideways strike, you’ve duplicated the lack of rifling marks.” I grinned up at him. “Nice work, Deputy. Only one thing’s wrong with this whole scenario.”
“Yup.” Torrez pocketed the notebook. “With the wrong ammo in the gun, we can’t hit shit.”
“How many rounds did you fire at the target?”
“Same as you, sir. Five rounds. One hit. The rest just splattered. The one hit was dumb luck.”
“Not much of a batting average.” I regarded the gravel at my feet. “I’ve got this image of the gunman walking toward Larry Zipoli. He’s carrying the rifle, and Larry puts the grader into neutral. What, we’re going to have a little show and tell? Someone’s bought a new rifle and he’s going to show it to Larry? But then the guy stops some X number of feet in front of the grader and throws up to his shoulder. Larry’s got time maybe to think, ‘Oh, shit,’ and the round comes through the windshield and nails him in the forehead.”
“Maybe.” The tone of his voice said that he didn’t believe it for a second.
“So the statistics say, Roberto. But are you going to go assassinating with a rifle that hits the target only one time out of five? And that’s at only fifty goddamn feet. I don’t think so. I mean, none through the center. None where we aimed. Only a moron would try that. Hell, big and pugnacious as Larry Zipoli might be, he’d have had time to jump down and bury a lug wrench in the guy’s head.” I shrugged.
“And we even found the lug wrench this morning,” Torrez reminded me.
I looked across at Estelle. “Remember what I said about puzzle parts, young lady?” She nodded. “We’re ready to hear ideas.”
Again, she took her time. “It would be helpful to know how many shots people heard.”
I laughed and stood up. “You and me both. And suppose that two reliable witnesses…and isn’t that a goddamn oxymoron-suppose that two people heard a total of ten shots. Are we supposed to think that Larry Zipoli was so stupid that he just sat there smoking his cigar as thirty caliber bullets went zinging all around his cab? And not one of those bullets even grazes the grader…not a goddamn one…until the fatal shot hits dead center?” I shook my head in frustration.
“Except that it’s possible that the first shot just happened to be the successful one,” Estelle Reyes said quietly. She didn’t amplify the comment. I could figure out the one-shot scenario for myself, but I didn’t believe it for a second. I guess I out-waited her, since eventually she added a statement of simple statistical fact.
“The first shot can just as easily be the one bulls-eye as the fourth, the seventh, or the tenth…or the hundredth.”
“Yup,” Bob Torrez said. After all his work, of course he wanted that to be true.
“Pretty goddamn undependable way to kill somebody,” I said.
Chapter Sixteen
My brain was a whirl of disconnected thoughts on the short ride back into town. A tractor-trailer rode up on our back bumper for a while, and I realized that I was putting along, not much more than thirty-five miles an hour in a sixty-five zone. After a few seconds of that, the trucker grew impatient and thundered by, cop car or not. His plates were Texan, his mud flaps big, waving promos for Tyler Trucking in Kansas, his trailer hauling something under the banner of Merlin Foods out of Denver, the cab door bearing the logo for Dutchess Trucking headquartered in Phoenix. That potpourri of places might have made me curious if I hadn’t been distracted with other issues.
He blew through the first speed zone on the outskirts of Posadas, then braked hard to catch the westbound ramp for the Interstate, where he’d be someone else’s problem.
I was about to comment that with all the curious geography displayed on his truck, the driver might have been more careful about basic things like signaling his turns so he didn’t attract undue attention. Had I just been cruising, I would have stopped him for a chat.
My radio chirped even as other concerns rumbled through my brain. Larry Zipoli’s personnel records remained untouched. I needed a quiet corner to settle in and catch up on my reading. I didn’t need another interruption.
Without being told, Estelle Reyes palmed the mike like a veteran. “PCS, three ten.”
“Three ten, contact Dr. Perrone at Posadas General reference your previous stop,” the dispatcher said. Estelle glanced at me and I nodded.
“Ten four, PCS,” she said and hung up the mike.
“We’ll swing by the hospital on the way,” I said. “We need to do that anyway.”
I saw one of her shapely black eyebrows drift upward and knew what she must be thinking…on the way where?
“I want to chat with Marilyn Zipoli again. A couple of things keep nagging me. Something doesn’t quite fit, and I don’t know what it is.” I paid attention to traffic for a moment-elderly Theodora Baca’s huge sedan pulling across my lane to enter the Posadas Inn’s parking lot. Perhaps it was their iced tea that beckoned her-the only recipe on their little restaurant’s menu that wasn’t close to poisonous.
“And before we do that, I need to spend some time with Zipoli’s records. It’ll be interesting to see what Marilyn has to say about all that. I mean, how could she not know that Larry had a drinking problem. No way she wouldn’t know. Not someone as sharp as she is.”
We passed through the intersection with Bustos, then turned east on the little spur of North Pershing to the Posadas General Hospital parking lot. I parked in one of the slots marked Emergency Vehicles Only, and saw the white Dodge van with the Posadas Auto Parts logo on its broad flank. The keys to old man Newton’s Caddy were still in my pocket.
“Unfinished business,” I said. “When young Nick went to work this morning, he thought this was going to be a normal day. And then it went to shit.”