I looked at her soft ebony skin, so innocent, so out of place against the cold, clinical surroundings. Part of me wanted to just reach out and lay a hand against her cheek. She had such a lovable face.
A large puncture wound, freshly cleaned of blood, tore up the flesh around the child’s right chest. “Two bullets,” Claire explained, “basically right on top of each other, in rapid succession. I could see why EMS might’ve missed it. They almost tore through the same hole.”
I sucked in a horrific double take. A fit of nausea gripped at my gut.
“The first one exited right through her scapula,” Claire went on, easing the tiny body over on its side. “The second bounced off the fourth vertebra and lodged in her spine.”
Claire reached over and picked up a glass petri dish resting on a nearby counter. With a tweezer, she held up a flattened lead disk about the size of a quarter. “Two shots, Linds… The first tore through the right ventricle, doing the trick. She was probably dead before this one even struck.”
Two shots… two one-in-a-million ricochets? I replayed the likely position of Tasha as she exited the church and the killer’s line of fire in the woods. One seemed plausible, but two…
“Did Charlie Clapper’s crew find any bullet nicks in the church above where the girl was positioned?” Claire inquired.
“I don’t know.” It was standard procedure in all homicides to painstakingly match up all bullets with their marks. “I’ll check.”
“What was the church constructed of where she was hit? Wood or stone?”
“Wood,” I said, realizing where she was heading. No way wood on its own would deflect a bullet from an M16.
Claire pushed her operating glasses high on her forehead. She had a cheery, amiable face, but when she was certain, as she was now, it had a glow of conviction that admitted no doubt. “Lindsay, the angle of entry is frontal and clean for both shots. A ricocheting shell would likely have come in from a different trajectory.”
“I went over every inch of the shooter’s position, Claire. The way he was firing, he’d have to be a goddamn sharpshooter to set up that shot.”
“You say the fire was sprayed irregularly across the side of the church.”
“In a steady pattern, right to left. And Claire, no one else was struck. A hundred shots, she was the only one hit.”
“So you assumed this was a tragic accident, right?” Claire peeled off her plastic medical gloves and tossed them deftly into a waste receptacle. “Well, these two were no accident at all. They didn’t ricochet off of anything. They were straight and perfectly placed. Killed her instantly. You willing to consider the possibility that maybe your gunman hit exactly what he was aiming at?”
I brought back the scene in my mind. “He would have only had
an instant to line up such a shot, Claire. And only a foot or two of clearance from the wall to squeeze it in.”
“Then either God didn’t smile on that poor girl last night,” Claire said with a sympathetic sigh, “or you better start looking for one hell of a shooter.”
Chapter 12
THE SHOCKING POSSIBILITY that Tasha Catchings might not have been a random victim after all dogged me all the way back to the office. Upstairs, I ran into a wall of detectives anxiously awaiting me. Lorraine Stafford informed me there was a positive from the auto search, a ’94 Dodge Caravan reported stolen three days ago down the peninsula in Mountain View. I told her to see if any of the characteristics matched.
I grabbed Jacobi and told him to wrap up his bagel and come with me.
“Where we headed?” he groaned.
“Across the bay. Oakland.”
“Mercer’s still looking for you,” Karen shouted as we hit the hall. “Whaddaya want me to say?”
“Tell him I’m investigating a murder.”
Twenty minutes later, we had crossed the Bay Bridge, woven through the drab, antiquated skyline that was downtown Oakland, and pulled up in front of the Police Administration Building on Seventh. Oakland’s police headquarters was a short gray panel-and-glass building in the impersonal style of the early sixties. On the second floor was Homicide, a cramped, dreary office no larger than our own. Over the years, I’d been here a few times.
Lieutenant Ron Vandervellen stood up to greet us as we were led into his office. “Hey, I hear congratulations are in order, Boxer. Welcome to the world of sedentary life.”
“I wish, Ron,” I replied.
“What brings you here? You looking to check out how the real world works?”
For years, the San Francisco and Oakland homicide departments had maintained a kind of friendly rivalry, they believing all we dealt with across the bay was the occasional computer parts salesman found naked and dead in his hotel room.